media studies

We Failed Domestic Violence Victims- Preemptive Strategies and Losing (or Finding) Jian Ghomeshi

(***TRIGGER WARNING***: Several links here and throughout this post refer to descriptions of violence that may be triggering for survivors.  My previous entry, prior to the revelations of additional claims and Lucy DeCoutere and Reva Seth’s coming forward, is here).

(UPDATE #2 (10/31): The digital age is ripe to be exploited for misinformation, but this case now appears to provide a compelling case for how one ripple in the digital world can lead to the disclosure we wish for but do not often volunteer. A detailed story published by the Toronto Star indicates that Ghomeshi may have inadvertently sped up the investigation on himself by reacting in paranoia to the Twitter account, Big Ears Teddy, which only posted tweets from April 9-11. An official investigation is finally underway).

(UPDATE #1 (10/31): Apologies that I missed this item before submitting this, but Navigator has dropped Jian Ghomeshi as a client).

If you only click on and read one link in this entire post, make it this one. This summarizes the tremendous frustration about the terrible events that make the story right now.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning (while packing and preparing for #collegemedia14), I did something of which I’m not sure I’m horribly ashamed, but of which I certainly know I’m anything but proud.

I went on a Jian Ghomeshi listening/watching binge (and no, I’m not linking any of it).

I listened to the podcast of his last Q episode from start-to-finish. I listened to several interviews of him from his book tour of 2012. I listened to bunch of his “audio essays.” I listened to some of his best & in some cases (Howie Mandel) poignant interviews as a radio host. And I listened, in a state of surreal shock, to his Gamergate interviews—in which women detailed to him the horrors of cyberstalking and death threats they were experiencing—which were conducted only ten days ago.

I think, somehow, I knew— as Robyn Urback wrote today— the dam was about to break. And I theorized in conversations that there was any number of reasons why I found myself compelled to go on my listening binge before it did. Those reasons including:

— The natural temptation to see if there was any clues in the public persona that had been staring us in the face all along. Oh sure, he was smarmy…but how many smarmy media personalities are there out there? Are they all this horrible?
— Similarly listening for the clues in his book tour interviews: the descriptions of a life as an outsider due to Persian background and the seemingly strong connection to his recently deceased father. How could someone who claimed to work so hard to make his dad proud be something so much different?
— The surreal feeling of listening to a person’s last known photograph. Somehow the public Jian Ghomeshi feels…not so much like he was never real. But like he was killed by the private Jian Ghomeshi. And that man took his time doing it. And he physically abused and emotionally scarred possibly countless women- real, very real, very non-fictitious people- along the way.
— The cruel fate that his last two episodes would encompass Gamergate conversations, the Ottawa shootings and the subjects of depression and suicide with Clint Malarchuk. (Malarchuk, not knowing what was to unfold, tweeted this afterwards).

And finally, listening to a historical archive of a man being a voice of reason for the nation…and slowly realizing something dark and sinister. And something that, quite frankly as someone who advises student journalists and radio hosts for a living, is downright haunting:

If Jian Ghomeshi the radio host was a different person than Jian Ghomeshi today, he’d be the first person most of Canada would have turned to for commentary on this story.

Not any of the women. Not any of the women who knew the women. Not any of the friends that tried to provide shelter to the women. You can very easily surmise the first voice on the matter on a Monday morning would have been Jian’s, ever so calmly starting with his signature “Hi there,” ostensibly presenting his “word of radio god.”

And even just that one realization tells you right there: we failed. We failed the women of Canada, the women of the world. We keep failing, and I’m right there with all of us.

———-

One of my students wrote a powerful story for The Signal earlier this semester on why sexual assaults go underreported and that story doesn’t lead all that differently from this one that I linked above, the most important story of all. My students’ story was accompanied by a staff editorial, which was well-intentioned and, quite frankly, strongly reasoned.

But still, more often than not, we do not report. Oftentimes, it’s up to the good journalists, it’s up to the Toronto Star muckrakers we’ve seen in action, to wrangle up as much as earthly possible in a story to uncover the truth. Why? As “Melissa” from Nothing From Winnipeg wrote: “Do you know about Jian?” That’s why.

Those horrible feelings that something is not right, with enough people feeling the same thing all around you, with enough people whispering terrible things but somehow no one ever really being able to point to the person that can corroborate it in a way that everyone can know… even though…they know. I don’t have any close friends near the situation, but many have moved to various places across Canada and have heard from those who know about Jian. Some of them bit their lip because they felt it might not be ever possible to prove.

When the dam bursts, it becomes impossible to deny. Oh sure, we still have not an ounce more of physical evidence than we had on Monday when many of us tried to hold our feelings on the matter at bay. But now we have people putting names to their accusations. Now we have people offering vivid descriptions. Now we have a conspiracy theory of Ghoeshi’s (lawyers’) imagination so vast that moon landing conspiracy theorists would state “I’m sorry, that’s a stretch.”

But why do we have to let the dam reach the breaking point? Why do so many assaults go unreported (or underreported)? Why did it take not one assault by Ghomeshi to merit a journalistic investigation but a virtual plethora of them? Much of it stems from how we take our the principle of the presumption of innocence to a rather twisted end.

—–

I described Ghomeshi’s approach in his Facebook statement as a “a multi-pronged reduction of offensiveness approach: bolstering (reminding everyone of his work as a ‘good (CBC) solider’), minimization (‘we’re not talking about assault, we’re talking about consensual BDSM’) and attacking the accuser (insinuating this is the “campaign” of ‘jilted ex-lover’).”

But others were much more to the point and accurate: his team was trying to pull a David Letterman. Furthermore, It was only logical that this was the only aim because winning the accompanying lawsuit was swiftly judged as pragmatically impossible.

We’ve logically come to a very quick conclusion about the Letterman strategy: it failed. There are two reasons for this.

The minimization effect worked for Letterman because the blackmail attempt was a much easier story to believe. The most Ghomeshi could hope for was that the accusations towards him would remain as vague as they did on Monday so that his conspiracy theory could hold water. That didn’t even remain a reality for 24 hours. By Wednesday morning, the accusations were so varied, descriptive, and from differing social circles with no real compelling interest to defame Ghomeshi seeming obvious. On the other hand, Letterman’s story was easy to believe right away and thus his infidelities were immediately minimized against what was perceived as a greater crime, that of trying to blackmail him.

Second, Letterman’s story stopped unfolding. He didn’t just get ahead of it. He stopped it. There was no danger of Letterman being arrested. His infidelity may have been reprehensible but it posed no danger of arrest nor did any suggestions it would lead to assault take hold. Letterman was deemed by some to be “merely” reprehensible, Ghomeshi is now understood to be dangerous.

And that second difference is why we’re all kicking ourselves now. The law indicates Ghomeshi is “innocent until proven guilty” and we carry that so far so as to not even begin or demand a police investigation now after this many allegations. In the police’s case, possibly out of respect of victims’ fears of vengeance of a perpetrator before a sentence can be laid out. In the public’s case, because of a false equivalency between a rush to investigate and a rush to judgement.

I write all of this not to pin blame on a specific person other than Jian Ghomeshi. Any assaults committed by him, however many they be, are his responsibility and his to be punished for. But that doesn’t mean that we as a collective haven’t failed. Because Ghomeshi’s story hasn’t stopped, more come forward. Yet still we do not do enough. We try to walk the delicate line of respecting victims, respecting the justice system but yearning to take assault allegations seriously, despite the overwhelming evidence we collectively don’t.

And after everything I’ve written, I have few solutions. Here’s two starting points, though:

– You don’t have to believe every single rape or assault allegation you hear. But you should never disbelieve it until it can be soundly disproven. The mythological “pot of gold” that a false rape accuser gets still eludes us all- the sensible ones of all, that is. Hateful, sexist dialog towards accusers of people you want to stick up for is inexcusable, no matter how good of a friend, ally or figure that might be. The consequences of stigmatizing an accuser, no matter how frivulous a charge may seem, is far greater than the consequences of giving an accusation a chance to be investigated.

– Here are some resources. Get familiar:

http://www.cwhn.ca/
http://www.canadianwomen.org/facts-about-violence
http://www.nrcdv.org/
http://www.dvrc-or.org/
http://www.thehotline.org/
http://www.ncadv.org/

——

One last thought,

Jian Ghomeshi said something in one of those many “Q essays” (again, not linking it) and it seems like he was oblivious to it. “Journalism is not a crime.” We tell our students, “you the student are subject to the same journalism that you practice on the students you write about.” Perhaps there are people who think they are media figures think they get immunity. They don’t.

After all of this, it remains as true, and in as dark of terms as possible, as when I first wrote it: something very sad has happened. Not just at CBC, but across Canada.

Something Very Sad Has Happened at CBC

Resources for victims of domestic violence can be found here.

(UPDATE #3 (10/29/14): **TRIGGER WARNINGS**, This following links contains either written or audio descriptions of violence which may be triggering to survivors. An anonymous woman claims abuse at the hands of Ghomeshi, citing the incidents as just over a decade ago, on the CBC radio program As It Happens. And the first woman to come forward publicly did so shortly thereafter, actress Lucy DeCoutere, to the Toronto Star).

(UPDATE #2 (10/28/14) Even more relevant to my world is this reflection on the furor and what it says about the power of radio from Paula Simons at the Edmonton Journal).

(UPDATE (10/28/14): Since I posted this, there have been a couple of excellent stories on the various angles of this situation. Brenda Cossman offers an excellent legal analysis for The Globe and Mail. Soraya Nadia McDonald writes for The Washington Post about the suspicions from many in the kink community of Ghomeshi’s public statement).

It’s no secret that due to my job description, history with the station and genuine affinity for it and its content, I usually find myself listening to Album 88 during my morning commute. But there are sometimes exceptions to the rule. Being a big sports fan, I may occasionally check out the local sports stations for my favorite teams. Or I’ll check in with college radio stations from my past.

And I’ll sometimes check in on my hometown and nation by accessing the Sydney feed of CBC radio. Which means that I occasionally find myself listening to the national radio show Q.

By any reasonable standard, Q is an excellent public radio program featuring a wide range of guests on a wide range of subjects and some of that credit, at least, must go to its now-former host, Jian Ghomeshi. You might love his smooth delivery, ability to make interviewees feel at ease (well, most interviewees…) and ask questions beyond the usual drivel of “tell me about your latest album/movie and is it the greatest thing you’ve ever done?” On the other hand, you might find him to be a “typical public radio host,” in the perjorative sense of the word, who’s too much in love with the sound of his voice. This is something that was rather expertly parodied several times on This Hour Has 22 Minutes (the 50 Shades references hit closer to home now, don’t they?). It’s fitting that his last Q “essay” introduction came on the heels of the tragic events on Parliament Hill in Ottawa last week. If you like Ghomeshi, it serves as a great parable for a gravitas well-earned. If you hate him, it serves a great parable for self-appointed pomposity.

It’s hard to recap what led to Jian’s departure/dismissal from the show this weekend, and no one web source provides a tidy timeline. But this is CBC’s version of events, this is Jian’s version of events and this is the version of events from the one publication that claims to have been investigating sexual abuse allegations against Ghomeshi for a long while.

The public relations war has already begun (when we’re dealing with a $55 million lawsuit, how can a PR war not happen?). Ghomeshi has hired a high profile firm to defend him. He (and they) are employing a multi-pronged reduction of offensiveness approach: bolstering (reminding everyone of his work as a “good (CBC) solider”), minimization (“we’re not talking about assault, we’re talking about consensual BDSM”) and attacking the accuser (insinuating this is the “campaign” of “jilted ex-lover”).

Of course, the Twitterverse is weighing in along with all other forms of social media (especially the multiple comments sections). And I find myself incredibly saddened by the situation, which provides no sunny interpretation, and the public response so far.

On the one hand, I feel as though there is a lot of presumption of guilt from critics who don’t have a lot of the facts of the case in front of them. Going back to last year, when a xojane contributor made thinly veiled allegations presumed to be about Ghomeshi, there has been a rush from some to immediately castigate the radio host for something only whispered about and not proven beyond the faintest of “he said, she said” terms. It is entirely possible that Ghomeshi, as he is suggesting, simply has a right to a private sex life, that includes kinks and fetishes the public may dislike, without it affecting his job. It’s not an inconceivable blackmail scenario and many who get riled by the telling of a story without first evaluating its truth value are likely to be riled up.

But on the other hand,

The rhetoric of those rushing to have the host reinstated also rings painfully hollow with me. It seems that his defenders have taken his statement of “I was fired because CBC was embarrassed by what this blackmail attempt will reveal about me” at face value. It’s interesting that his defenders talk of being innocent until proven guilty: Ghomeshi isn’t the defendant in the lawsuit, CBC is. Until proven otherwise, the trite principle actually suggests we must assume CBC had a perfectly good reason for letting Ghomeshi go.

There is a level of star-crossed worship at play here. In one of the many facets of “adult life mimics high school life,” I’ve often found that those inclined to find themselves in the arts community will deride celebrity-worship, particularly of athletes. This is very au courant because mounting testimonials and evidence suggests that if you’re watching the NFL (which I freely admit I do), you’re likely watching a lot of wife-beaters in action– which is a horrible reality to contemplate.

Being someone who was as likely to be found at the game as he was at the local indy show was always something of an awkward situation for me…and still is.  The suggestion of many “anti-jock” types was that the popular kids and meathead jocks were the sexist bastards of the universe, unjustly glorified for “just being able to put a ______ in a _____ on a (insert playing surface),” elevated to the status of gods and thus far more susceptible to perpetuating rape culture.

However, there’s an observable discomfort when people we assume to be intellectually, culturally or socially “refined” or “superior” in some way face similar allegations. It’s why cultural critics (moderate, right-wing or otherwise) often call out the (perceived, at least) left for too hastily defending auteurs like Woody Allen and Roman Polanski despite their crimes. Huffington Post contributor Justin Beach hits to the heart of this in a fine op-ed piece: many people are rushing to Ghomeshi’s defense simply because he seems too good a cultural archetype to be guilty of this sort of behavior.

But this doesn’t hold up to any reasonable scrutiny. Gamergate and alt-lit disputes, for example, demonstrate that any culture that leads to adulation can foster rape culture and that adulation need not be on a mass scale. Furthermore, the castigation of accusers before details can be gathered can have a chilling effect. If it comes out that CBC fired or dismissed Jian not because they thought he was guilty of a crime, but because they found having a morning radio host that was into BDSM distasteful? That’s on CBC, not anyone who’s accused Ghomeshi of assault, harrassment or sexual misconduct.

Any statements or public reaction that discourage victims of sexual assault from coming forward are beyond the pale of disheartening, they’re sinister- whether unconsciously or otherwise. If Ghomeshi is the victim of a disaffected ex, that’s a terrible thing for him. But let’s not kid ourselves, victims of sexual assault and domestic abuse suffer slings and arrows that $55 million lawsuits cannot deflect.

So, it might be best not to conclusively rule on anything other than to say that we’re definitely faced with a coin flip that is terrible either way.

On the more trivial side, either a public figure many of us admired was much less than we thought he was or we were deprived of an excellent radio host for no tangibly good reason. On the less trivial side, either the state (the CBC in this case) has placed itself in the bedrooms of the nation or Jian Ghomeshi got away with deplorable things due in no small part to a culture that turned the other way from his behaviour. And least trivial of all, either a select number of people have suffered battery and/or abuse or they have diminished these very serious types of crimes with false allegations.

Either way, something very sad has happened at the CBC.

Quest For Info: In State, Across States and Home

It’s a John Lennon sort of day today. Everyone searching for some truth.

You’ll notice when you enter the front page of my website, the following statement appears: “(This page does not officially represent Georgia State University or any of the Georgia State University Student Media divisions).” I should add to that “or the University System of Georgia”.

Especially since the students that cross my path on a regular basis occasionally cross the path of the Board of Regents.

One such student is David Schick. Schick contributed a bit to The Signal this year during his transfer year from Georgia Perimeter College to GSU. His work ethic stood out such that USA Today selected him to be their GSU correspondent. However, it’s his time at GPC that remains as pertinent to the present as anything because of an unresolved Open Records Request.

Before transferring to GSU, Schick (then EIC of The Collegian) made a request for 15 budget related documents. As of now, he doesn’t have seven of them. GPC had laid off 282 employees and reports alleged that the school had “overspending for years” thus causing the shortfall precipitating the layoffs (Collegian adviser David Simpson was among the casualties). Schick’s request reflected his journalistic curiosity as to whether or not this allegation was true and if so, how could it have gone on undetected for so long.

That was in July 2012. Today, Schick filed suit against the USG Board of Regents because he still doesn’t have all of the documents he requested.

Open Record Requests are not supposed to simply be a resource for professional journalists: anyone can request them. However, oftentimes, the costs given to requestors can be quite exorbitant. I’ve advised students who have placed ORRs that have resulted in four-figure quotes and that is more likely of a possiblity the more redactions are deemed necessary due to various legal concerns. The original quoted cost of Schick’s ORR began the delays and the new quote remains a sticking point.


David Schick

The lawsuit is instructive on a few levels:

1) American college journalists shouldn’t just pay attention to what their university administration is doing, they should also be mindful of the systems under which the administrations operate. The one thing I find myself suggesting to my students during teardowns more often than not is “you should call the students at (Somewhere Else in Georgia) University and see if the same thing’s happening there.” And where the public universities are concerned, the USG is the first place to look for why things work the way they work.

2) Open government is messy, whether the facts of the case dictate that it has to be or not (and being 100% fair, I’ve yet to hear USG’s response to the suit). Launching an ORR isn’t activity exclusively reserved for journalists but non-exclusivity doesn’t necessarily dicate ease. Rights to privacy often clash with rights to public information and even after that, debates will arise has to whether or not public officials leverage the perception rights to privacy are in play when they aren’t. (An ongoing controversy in campus journalism is how much FERPA is used and misused in ORRs).

3) This is yet another case that proves that students do have the most important story ideas sometimes. This is not the AJC* or a network affiliate (or even Creative Loafing, though David’s worked there as well) causing such a ruckus, just one journalist on behalf of one student newspaper. That he doesn’t even edit or write for anymore. Students are affected by a lot of things and think that their problems exist on their island, but that island can be exposed to a wider audience if you ask a question or two.

* = One person commenting on an AJC column about the affair writes “I guess that I’m kind of curious as to why a lone student journalist is carrying the spear here. Why has the larger media complex not been all over this like ugly on an ape ?” Eek.

It will be interesting to see how far the case proceeds. There’s interest is in the verdict, yes, but also in the discussion will be on reasonable cost projections on citizen requests and the level of awareness it will create for student journalists on covering their campus budget beats.

————————————————————

Whenever there’s someone saying that we’re not getting enough information, however, there’s someone that thinks we have too much. Nationally, that’s the case with the Edward Snowden case. Snowden’s recent online interview detailing his whistleblowing on the National Security Agency has attracted a lot of buzz. The future doesn’t seem promising for the whistleblower. Snowden must believe as much as his plans essentially involve never setting foot on American soil again. At the time of this entry, he’s fallen off of the planet.


America’s Most Wanted

Two takeaways from this?

1) The furor over the PRISM leak seems to reveal that we’re not as “post-post 9/11“*** we think we are. Specifically, it’s interesting that the lines of inappropriateness have been drawn domestically. William Binney worked with the NSA for 28 years but only quit when he felt the surveillance of domestic data got to be too much. Obviously legally, this makes sense: the privacy issue is framed as a constitutional one and the constitution only applies to American citizens. However, no one has asked yet if PRISM’s reach has affected private citizens of other parts of the world whose connections to terrorism would be specious at best. There does seem to be an invisible “othering” in play.

*** = “Post-post-9/11” should be considered a scale rather than an absolute. Just as scholars reminds us that Obama’s 2008 election shouldn’t be treated as a pass/fail inscription of the notion of a “post-racial” society.” There are other elements upon which we can assess 9/11’s effect on social perception and policy beyond suspicion and personal privacy.

2) I wonder if this case is going to make people think twice about how much they voluntarily disclose online. Never mind the companies that try to facilitate our unwitting divulging of information, the social mediation we currently experience leaves a lot of people thinking it doesn’t matter whether people know everything about everyone anyway. So much so that I regularly now see panels at national media conventions where professionals essentially try to shame 18-24 year olds to keep to them damn selves when Twittering and Facebooking. They shame them with “you won’t get hired!” Are we going to transform this into “the government can take everything you did 30 years ago and ruin you?” or will the new generation reply “if anything, I’ve learned I can’t do anything private on the Internet anyways so YaskY?”

Danah Boyd argues that you can’t take refuge in the idea that “I’ve done nothing illegal” because PRISM takes us in a direction that “presumes entire classes and networks of people as suspect” (particularly apt here is her analogy on how we all freak out after doing our taxes and imagining feeling that way all the time). “Nothing to hide” does indeed often fail as logic and it seems like we’re a culture that’s hiding less and less. However, recent scholarship suggests that the more we get into our social media, the more we seek privacy out. If that research is indicative of our behaviour, you can expect us to be outraged about PRISM for a long, long time.

————————————————————

Speaking of hiding, I wonder where Manning is these days.

No, not Bradley Manning (though that’s very directly relevant). Preston Manning.

Remember Preston Manning? The squeaky voiced idealist who emerged from the Canadian Praries in the late-80s with a message of populism, more provincial equality, less wasteful spending and what not? The man who was vocal in an anti-establishment charge against the Charlottetown Accord that taught Canadians you could beat all the major parties in one referendum?***** And the man who took the Reform Party from the fringes to the opposition benches, which led the way to a merger with the Tories that left the Liberal Party in shambles?

***** = I struggle to imagine the U.S. voting populace being given a chance to smack both the Republicans and Democrats in the face as mightily as Canada smacked the three major parties in the face in 1992.


And no one was happier than Preston

I lie when I paint a portrait of Manning literally hiding. He was seen only weeks ago denying that his non-profit organization is fronting a movement to undermine the current mayor of Calgary. And he’s still beating a familar drum from 20 years past, reforming the Canadian Senate.

However, I still feel like the old Preston is hiding when I see the latest news about Conservative tumult. The Reform Party was never very popular east of Manitoba and social progressives absolutely bristled at the thought of their taking charge. However, there seemed to be a general consensus that one upside to Manning’s movement succeeding would be an increase in accountability and information. The Liberals had turned off even many of its own voters with its image of an arrogant, power-entitled group oblivious to its own scandals and Jean Chretien was frequently criticized for centralizing too much of the power to the office of the Prime Minister.

Now Stephen Harper is arguably the most power-centralized Prime Minister in Canada’s history and it’s starting to take its toll on the party. Alberta MP Brent Rathgeber departed in a huff and reports indicate that the grumblings of Defence Minister Peter MacKay are getting louder. The Senate remains unchanged, unabolished and the accounting of a Conservative senator’s expenses is now an issue. The Office of the Auditor General– an office designed to corral overspending which was the biggest Reform pet peeve of all– is constantly in disagreement with the CPC. It’s a far cry from what the Reform Party projected on a mount of Western alienation in a not-too-distant past. Which is puzzling since some people were quick to trumpet the 2011 election out as a realization of Manning’s work– not the least of which Manning himself.

The press is positioning this as a populist vs. moderate fight and that seems half-right. How “moderate” Rathgeber or MacKay or anyone else is or isn’t on social issues hasn’t publicly frothed to the surface as a source of discontent yet. However, there is one very simple strain of populism clashing with moderate politics. Moderate politics dictates that what is electorally successful is too some degree justified. However, many within the conservative movement are concerned because, majority or not, as one blogger puts it, “Surely Conservatives deserve a party that is bigger than one man—i.e., Stephen Harper”.


Manning’s Idealistic Stephen Harper

When these “new” Conservatives came to town, there’d be more accountability and the Prime Minister, even if you disagreed with his policies, wouldn’t be so power mad. You could ask questions in the House of Commons with less fear of blowback within your own party if you didn’t tow the line. The CPC that voters encounter now is certainly a far cry from the Liberals on economic issues and some social issues (though they’ve yet to touch gay marriage despite the worst fears of progressive voters). However, it has done nothing substantial to tackle the Senate issue and it’s created an image that only the Prime Minister is in a position to comment on anything.

It hasn’t taken on the level of the mid-2000s Liberals yet and some columnists argue that all of this hubbub can only strengthen Harper’s resolve for 2015. Still, regular deficits, quibbles with the Auditor General and Mike Duffy overspending? I can only imagine if there still is a 1992 Preston Manning hiding somewhere, clutching a Social Credit pamphlet and shrieking in horror.

All I can say, is that it’s enough to make this whole “transparency” thing catch fire.

Return from the abyss / Survivor = Wrestling / RISK and Reality “Gamebotting”

It’s been a long sabbatical from the online world.

I mean, really long. Seven months long. In the digital age, I may as well have abandoned my apartment and returned to see squatters trifling through rubbish…only to find I didn’t leave much behind.

So what’s been going on in the interim?

–> GSU student media outlets continued to make me proud. The spring brought good news as GSTV,The Signal and WRAS all received placements at the Southeast Journalism Conference and The Signal added some state awards to that list as well. Speaking of which…

SignalGCPA
I clean up nicely when I have students to not embarrass

–> GSU was selected to host the 2015 SEJC. We’ve already hosted our own in house conference (with a followup planned for the fall) and a regional Society of Professional Journalists conference. Perhaps a future career is conference planning?

–> The Student Activities department also did its Panther Leadership Academy, which I always find rejuvenating and inspiring. This year, it was held at the Enota Mountain Retreat area in Hiawassee. Aside from helping build group leadership skills, the retreat had trampolines. We’re all lucky I’m not still bouncing around up there.

–> My wife has gotten really, really into geocaching. Well, OK, she already was into it, but now she’s really into it. So I’ve seen a lot of backroads of Georgia.

–> We’ve been planning a summer excursion to Lima and Iquitos as well as the Machu Picchhu trail near Cusco. Hard as it is for me to believe, I actually haven’t left this humble continent in my lifetime. So look for me to come back stateside in late-July with hilarious misadventures of sherpas having to drag my sorry behind up the mountain and my inability to speak a sentence of anything not-English leading to horribly delicate misunderstandings.

That’s the real-life stuff going on with me. In the made-up(ish) universe…

——————————————————–

Something strange happened to me over the course of the past few months. While my colleagues and friends have been glued to the relevant shows of the day (and basically having heart attacks watching Sunday’s Game of Thrones episode), I was busy becoming reacquainted with a TV show more than a decade past its cultural zeitgeist. I stumbled back into the landmine of Survivor.

My wife likes to have a certain amount of TV shows “on the go” and re-added Survivor to her queue in February. I hadn’t really given much thought to it since Richard Hatch became America’s TV villain of 2000 for forming an alliance. The show has become especially “non-courant” with dwindling ratings leaving it strong enough to make renewals at CBS, but only because of a dedicated subculture.

Watching the show play out– and becoming more addicted to it than the person who suggested we watch it in the first place– I was struck by some of the similarities between Survivor and pro wrestling (more specifically the WWE), which fits my aca-fan profile. Similarities such as:

–> Neither are close to as popular as they were during their peak(s) yet both have major media forces that continually rely on repurposing for profit.

–>Wrestling and reality TV also overcome their dwindling popularity with lower overhead than their traditional dramatic counterparts. Wrestlers have no union and are usually relegated to no-name status without their WWE trademarks. Survivor contestants compete for prizes and returning players are shunned if they demand any additional compensation for their notoriety.

–> Both Jeff Probst and Vince McMahon, the most powerful people in the Survivor and wrestling universes respectively, have traversed the path from host overshadowed by the talent to the showrunners seldom overshadowed by anybody.



Vince’s phlegm would put out the torch by itself

–> Since its infancy, Survivor has been much like wrestling was pre-Vince McMahon. Back then, everyone thought wrestling was fake, but no one admitted it. The entire “reality television” genre is shrouded with suspicions of how much it’s “rigged” and the Survivor fanbase often holds similar beliefs that certain seasons are decidedly tilted by producers to favour certain players.

–> Both have found themselves both compared and usurped in the popular imagination by something that’s kinda similar but really not similar at all. For the WWE, UFC. For Survivor, singing/talent shows.

–> Both subcultures stick with the product but endlessly complain that the producers won’t find fresh new faces. Entrenched crusty WWE fans tire of John Cena and Wrestlemanias centered on one-time-a-year wrestlers, Survivor fans are wondering when they’re going to get another season without any returning players, as the last three have all featured various numbers of returnees.

–> Both have hermeneutic terms of production that simultaneously are universal yet genre-specific in their application. In particular, the word “edit” amongst Survivor fans takes on individualistic meaning (as in “Brenda didn’t get a very good edit this season”) just as “booking” would appear to be another word for “writing” in wrestling jargon. Yet hardcore wrestling affectionados would tell you that what’s wrong with wrestlng today is too much writing and not enough booking.

–> Most fascinatingly, but sadly not surprising, both are genres of entertainment that wrestle (pardon the pun) with portrayals of women (maybe Ashley Massaro could comment?). Both McMahon and Probst seem most comfortable when they can keep their onscreen females in the 18-35 demographic but at least Probst always has a spot for a working mom or two. However, perhaps his portrayal of them is still lacking for nuance (see my point on gamebotting and Dawn Meehan below…).

Being a diminutive scrawny fellow and being someone who completed countless university assignments on his favourite pop culture phenomena, it wasn’t too hard for me to treat John Cochran as the protagonist of the affair– even as he attracted the wrath of many devoted Survivor legions who yearn for new faces and complained of his edit taking over the show.

Cochran is the face of non-zeitgeist Survivor. First, for being the example of character development that Probst now aspires to have Survior attain with returning players. Cochran “two season” arc was reality TV’s version of the hero’s quest (minus the refusals). His first season transformed him from the bullied to the turncoat to ultimately a poor player who nonetheless has his “world of cardboard” moment upon his exit. The second season completed the ascent deemed inevitable from that moment; such that some fans argued the casting was rigged (booked?) to complete the “storyline” satisfactorily with Cochran getting a favourable draw of fellow favourites to navigate his plan.

Second, and more importantly, Cochran is the face of compulsive theorizing the gameplay of a show that on the surface is designed to emphasize drama much more than any idea of sport. One of his talking points when auditioning was a Harvard assignment in which he compared the Survivor jury system to actual jury systems. This actually fits Cochran in with the subcultural universe that exists outside of CBS’ purview in which players dissect their moves in podcasts that sometimes exceed two hours per player.

Which lead me to an interesting discovery…

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I’m no more of a board game person than your average Jane or Joe but I played a fair bit of RISK with my compadres back in the day. It usually went as follows: 1) choose red, 2) desire to take over Africa, 3) get a crappy card draw, 4) wander instead, 5) roll crappy dice and be the second to go. Fun times.


Arrrrrrrrggghhhhhh!!! Europe again!!!

My friends were never keen on playing the marathon model of RISK I’ve heard so much about through TV mythos. My friend and colleague Shane Toepfer, however, regaled me with tales of his games where the board would sit for an entire weekend and players would hold private convos with each other to try to form (and break) alliances. In other words, it sounded like a less serious version of reality TV.

Which is why the latest venture of Survivor alum Rob Cesternino is particularly compelling. The new online show Reality Gamemasters pits Survivor and Big Brother alumni against each other in a simple RISK game. Except of course, add cheesy music and private discussion booths so that the game can be edited to essentially resemble the shows that made the participants D(E?)-level famous.

I’m anticipating that the meager $7,036 budget (funded by Kickstarter) and the compressed timeline of the actual game itself will provide a hilarious bizarro universe of the reality TV world.

Theoretically the players should be reduced to “gamebots.” Notorious Survivor villain Russell Hantz usually (involuntarily) wears the “gamebot” term perjoratively as someone who embraced backstabbing and manipulating and forgot the endgame of the jury actually wanting to vote for you.

The most recent season saw Mormon adoptive mother of six, Dawn Meehan, get the “villain edit” by opting to vote out Brenda Lowe despite their bond. The corresponding jury/audience response was rife with gender politics, as she was lambasted for simultaneously playing “too emotional” and “coldhearted” as though the two had to be constantly mutually exclusive by some sort of sacred law. Cochran declared the absurdity of taking such things so seriously with the pithy observation “she was voting people out of a game where the crucial part of the game is voting people out!”

However, the private discussion booths, the history of all six players and the over-the-top dramatizing is designed to add a fake layer of emotional consideration to make RISK seem less “gamebotty.” It’s probably a bit sad that this might not even be necessary with some people as there’s always that one friend who takes it just a bit personally that s/he’s the first target in RISK (“everyone’s out to get me!”). However, that fake layer only seeks to reveal the absurdity of reality TV itself, where games are prolonged to 30-50 days in an attempt to make them personal to both player and audience– even though they take up a tenth of a percentage point of someone’s lifespan.

I’ll probably lap up this cheesy reenactment and end up being way more chatty the next time I play RISK (oh boy, won’t my friends be appreciative?). It also mirrors Toepfer’s helpful dissection of the playful wrestling audience delighting in the obscure Champions of the Galaxy board game. These fans of reality TV were devoted enough with their games to end up playing it for real, but when the spotlight dims, they’re really just seeking any way to playfully engage with social gamesmanship– even if it’s in the form of a video-edited game of RISK.

You’ll note that Cochran chose the continent of Africa for his first landing spot and red as his army colour. He’s already playing RISK like me. Heaven help him.

NINE-SEVEN-NINE! / Knockout!

I was quite thrilled when ESPN decided to renew its 30 For 30 series.* The first installment offered a lot of illumination on some oftentimes told and other times not-as-often told stories from the world of sports folklore. The second film in the second series is a particularly salient one for me as a sports fan.

*Although I’m bit puzzled at how one keeps the name when the 30th anniversary of ESPN is long gone and we’re past 30 films…why not just call it “The ESPN Films Series?” Also the whole ”what if I told you” ad campaign strikes me as a bit inane as the question always seems to pose as a grand philosophical query yet usually precedes something of faux profoundness.

9.79* revisits the most famous 100 metre dash in history– possibly one of the five most famous events ever in Olympic history– that occurred at the 1988 Olympics.

Atlanta remains un-united

This is salient because it was the first Summer Olympics I ever watched. Thus I watched the Ben Johnson scandal through the eyes of a naïve Canadian fanboy, for lack of a better way of putting it. 24+ years later, the ever-developing nuances of the story fascinate me far more than the original 10 seconds of drama ever could have. One race encapuslated debates on race, social class, masculinity, our concepts of “fair play” and how to reconcile them with the ethic of “doing whatever it takes.” Some of these issues are explored and other not even touched on in the film, even though as a whole it just reminds me of all of it all over again.

One of my big takeaways was how the scandal introduced me to an ugly form of Canadian racism that I was even able to spot as that naïve 11 year old who stayed up past midnight to watch the race. The media seemed keen to celebrate Johnson’s “Canadian-ness” as a gold medal winner yet played up his Jamaican roots much more once he was caught (do a pre-88 and post-88 “Jamaican born Ben Johnson” LexisNexis search and see what I mean). The culture of racing is, of course, extremely important in Jamaica and the movie notes that Johnson wasn’t even the only island-born Canadian at the line that day and how Canada represented a journey to a better life to facilitate racing success, not ultimately hinder it.

The issue of ”othering” is fascinating as its rationalization process is so often incredibly contradictory. Barack Obama encounters this even to this day with some people stubbornly clinging to the theory that he was not born in America, even though if such allegations were true, it would shed far more light on something wrong with America’s inability to find it out if he got away with it for so long. Just the same, the documentary reveals how Johnson and a host of other black athletes were part of a doping system that was supervised and overseen by middle-class white coaches. The most notable being Charlie Francis, to whom the furor of disappointment never reached nearly the same level as it did Johnson.**

**And even despite publicly claiming that he didn’t believe one could win on an Olympic level without resorting to drugs, Francis still managed to carve an assocation with American sprinters such as former “30″ subject Marion Jones, who later also was found to have doped with the spotlight firmly tilted away from Francis or any of her other coaches.

It seems like Johnson being an exotic “other” was convenient when it shed negative light on Canada, just as Obama being a foreign “other” was/is convenient to those who disagreed with his politics. This is also particularly relevant at a time when Lance Armstrong has decided to recede from his fight against numerous doping allegations. Lance is not only not an “other,” he’s a sympathetic “non-other” as a cancer survivor. Hence it seems the vitirol one might expect towards him hasn’t surfaced.

9.79* does take a pass on other issues raised by the furor. Such as the ongoing debate on why Carl Lewis was never an incredibly popular man. The doc reminds us of Lewis rubbing his fellow competitors the wrong way and gives quite enough of him to indicate why that might be (anyone who claims to go to college to “get a degree in Carl Lewis” is probably possessed of an unhealthy amount of hubris***). As a young kid, I thought that hating Carl Lewis was something that a Canadian sports fan did since he was the archrival of our hero and Canada always naturally takes to any athletic rivalry with America (far more naturally than the States’ sports fans take to it, frankly). Of course, I didn’t have as much access to the media then to know that Lewis wasn’t exactly universally loved at home either.

Was it solely his expression of confidence (or arrogance) or was it something more? As early as the mid-80s, rumors of homosexuality followed Lewis around and it’s entirely possible that some of the dislike for Carl stemmed from the fact that he dared to be one of the greatest athletes of all time without looking or acting like a “real man” should. Some of Lewis’ responses– ”I’m no homosexual”– were as troublesome as the rumors. Not because Lewis failed to out himself or because he is indeed straight, but rather that he didn’t instead use the opportunity to open a dialogue as to why it would be so threatening if he was in the first place.

*** It’s worth noting that Calvin Smith, free of any shadowy drug history, seemed to fade in public consciousness despite presenting a far more humble image than Lewis. Yet if you watch the film, you’ll notice that he also comes across as somewhat effeminate, perhaps lending credence to the “gotta be macho” theory.

The most important reason to watch the film is to peek into the continued rationale and/or denial of athletes surrounding drug use as it raises the all-important question ”why do certain actions constitute cheating but others do not?” Six of the eight athletes in the race failed a drug point at least once in their careers, but some tests are deemed to be less significant than others. Johnson is positioned as a “truth will set you free” character free to rationalize his drug use rather than deny it because he’s already been caught (or possibly not: Johnson maintains that what he actually tested positive for was something he didn’t use, and the movie explores the espionage accusations behind that as well). The movie opens with the anonymous quote that echoes Johnson’s logic, “if you don’t take it, you won’t make it.”

It’s a riveting story and shows promise for the 30 series after a somewhat underwhelming re-debut (the very important but scattershot ”Broke”) and a potentially self-indulgent followup.

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It’s fascinating to compare a municipal debate to a national one and, for me at least, a Canadian one to an American one.

In my hometown, there’s a race for the mayor’s office. Several media outlets collaborated to host a debate between most of the candidates. Listening to the candidates answer debate questions, occasionally making small-town humour and taking a little extra time to properly phrase an answer to a question, makes me think “wow, these people would be eviscerated on a national stage.”

That’s not a dismissal of them. Quite the contrary. It’s a dismissal of decades of national debates being turned into a quest to find out when people stammer or when a “knockout moment” happens.

After a strong post-debate tilt in the polls for U.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, his VP candidate Paul Ryan is apparently ”prepping for a big knockout moment” tonight in his debate with Joe Biden. Whenever I read headlines like this, I’m inclined to cringe. Not because I’m anti-debate but rather because the purpose of debates continues to be twisted into a quest for a “knockout” or a “gaffe” rather than advancing any serious discussion on an issue.

There are two particularly discouraging things about this. The most discouraging is that scribes usually proclaim or discern “knockout moments” out of items not nearly possessed of the substance that they seem to be, especially in American politics. Usually, a “knockout moment,” for me, is where policy debate goes to die. For example, when Ronald Reagan dismissed Jimmy Carter’s medicare concerns with the pithy ”there you go again,” it received more focus than any substantive response to Carter’s response that Reagan offered. Logically speaking, “there you go again” made Carter look like a nag, but it didn’t really answer his question either. Just the same, when Lloyd Bentsen chastised Dan Quayle for being ”no Jack Kennedy,” it resonated as a great putdown, but generated more attention than any purported substance within the criticism.

The search for the ever-occurring gaffe can equally inane. Michael Dukasis’ expressed opposition to the death penalty was criticized for its lack of passion, as though the specifics of the opinion (that he felt such a penalty wouldn’t act as a deterrent) were irrelevant. Hence, it qualified as a “gaffe.” A more recent example is Rick Perry’s failure to remember the name of the Department of Energy in a Republican primary debate. It elicited great laughter, but it left any potential discussion about his plans to eliminate three departments completely in the dust.

The second reason why the “knockout quest” is so frustrating is that it’s debatable how far these moments really sway things in American elections. Take Romney’s current post-debate push: was there any one defining moment that sealed it? Likely not, it’s generally conceded Obama performed poorly in the debate overall rather than failing in any key moment. Looking at the some of the aforementioned examples, Reagan won the 1980 election by a landslide, Bush’s win over Dukasis was a fairly comfortable one; it’s hard to take away from either of those elections that one should look for such moments.

Atlanta remains un-united
Everyone remembers Bentsen’s putdown, but it ultimately didn’t help Dukasis

Yet that’s all we hear presidential candidates do: meet with their debate coaches (a good thing) and come armed to the tee with the right catchphrases to have their moment (not as good). If 1/4 of the enery was expended on how to produce a productive discussion on issues that there is expended on the knockout quest, Americans could be treated to something of major importance. It’s alarming how much less combative and more illuminating a third-party presidential debate is yet it attracts so little of the audience.

The “knockout” is perhaps a little more relevant in Canadian politics where the margin of victory actually counts for something, unlike a presidential debate. You can win by one electoral vote or by 200 electoral votes: at the end of the day, you’re still president. In a parliamentary system, the “knockout moment” could be the difference between a majority or minority government or opposition vs. backbench. ”You had an option” isn’t such an incredibly riveting moment because it won the Conservatives an election all by itself. It’s riveting because it turned a potential minority government or small majority into 211 seats. Everyone knew last year that Stephen Harper would still be Prime Minister after the election, but Jack Layton’s stern riposte of Michael Ignatieff and Ignatieff’s arrogance in the face of Layton’s criticisms is what likely helped tip it into majority terrority (as the NDP played spoiler to any fading Liberal hopes in Ontario) and place the opposition mantle firmly in the NDP’s hands for the first time.

However, regardless of whether the knockout works or not, I’d love to see a “postgame” report that focused on the feasibility of ideas presented, alternatives not considered and less focus on “how did Candidate X do?” I won’t hold my breath.

The loss of Phil Tarr / #MMC2012 / Of Teachers and Referees

Nothing else I write about this week has the gravity of the loss of a young artist’s life. The Cape Breton music scene was stunned this weekend when Philip Tarr passed away at his Sydney home at the age of 25:

Phil’s online obituary

The death is a tremendous loss to the community and its locally residing members could speak to it far more poignantly than I ever could, as they were present for his contributions and are thus most hurt by his absence. Tarr coordinated the Mess Folk outfit that put out a slew of MP3s and vinyl recordings in the past three years.

On a personal level, it was a reflection on my dissertation and personal transformation. My fieldwork was conducted in 2006 and Tarr and his brother James were but teenagers at the time, and not necessarily popular ones within the scene. They were agent provocateurs, if you would, rattling against the emo/screamcore trend of the day. Some of the posts on the CBLocals messageboard were under scrutiny for homophobia (the emo movement certainly bucked the masculine norms rock n’ roll sometimes presents) and disrupting the “signal-to-noise” ratio. Furthermore, the Tarrs were grindcore practitioners– or perhaps satirists of the amelodic genre– via James’ Canker project. They also formed a band titled The Abusive Stepdads.

Mess Folk steered more towards melody but it wasn’t necessarily greeted with open arms right away either. Philip famously called my hometown “a suitable hole to die in” in a Vice interview and MF’s content was occasionally inciteful on its face in the Stepdads vein (with song titles like I Beat My Woman Sometimes (And She Likes It)” and “Suicide Song”). The general arc of Mess Folk was exceptionally dark on its face but one reviewer noted, there was “a lot of snoot-cocking” in the band’s work. Tarr once told us through an online status that he feared ever living in the Brave New World; his music indeed reflected a lot of terrible misanthropic ugliness in the world.

Over time, however, Philip transformed into a scene notable. He likely won over several friends through work ethic alone (and his musical evolution to a 60s garage/punk throwback), but he also became a congenial peer and treasured friend to many. Only a few weeks before his death, he recorded an off-the-cuff track that is eerily autobiographical. It’s eerie to hear the line “I just want to be a musician” because it sounds like that was more of a struggle for someone who explored such dark subject matter while “just wanting to have some fun.”

It was a privilege for those who didn’t move away to get to know Philip on a level beyond his (alleged or not) “angry teenage troublemaker” days. If there were any demons haunting him in his life, I hope he had a chance to make peace on the way out.

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On a far less sobering note, here on the southern side of the border, reality hit me today that I needed to get my notes together for the GSU Modern Media Conference, which finally descends upon the school on Friday and Saturday. My students at The Signal dedicated an entire insert to the conference program in today’s issue. It’s an impressive lineup of presenters, to say the least.

My hats are off to the students doing all of the work to help put this together. A localized media conference is not an original idea of the current students; the Student Media department used to have “Media Day” back in the 1990s. It was an idea that was bandied about at meetings for years by several students and myself, but finally current Signal EIC Sabastian Wee said “hey, let’s do it!” And do it, we shall.

I’m flattered to be among those presenters…those notes I need because I will be conducting a panel on review writing. My students even did a spiffy write up on me in the insert…nice:

What a guy! :-p

If you’re a journalism/media student in Atlanta, we’ll see you this weekend, I’m sure that with the group of great professionals we have visiting, you won’t be disappointed!

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Fitting that it would be Wisconsin.

You might recall that Wisconsin is the state where the public employees protested a bill that would drastically affect teachers’ benefits (among other employees). Despite throngs of protestors descending upon the captial, public opinion polls indicated that there wasn’t a terrible wave of sympathy for the teachers. Several conservative critics framed them as nine-and-a-half monthers, cruising on blissful summer vacations and not working the full nine-to-five schedule. Others declared Walker’s eventual success pushing legislation through as a triumphant transfer of power from unions to elected officials.

Lo and behold, Wisconsin football fans- liberal, moderate, conservative and all points in between- were up in arms today as their pop culture darlings, the community-owned (imagine that) Green Bay Packers that were on the short end of an incredibly controversial ruling in Seattle last night on Monday Night Football. A controversial ruling that may never have happened if there wasn’t a lockout of the regular officials– normally the target of scorn, now suddenly the darlings of the sports fan set. It’s as if the karmic gods of organized labour decided to strike out at Governor Scott Walker’s biggest fan interests to spite him.

Suddenly Gov. Walker doesn’t seem to mind collective bargaining rights so much, something that one of his political opponents was all too keen to mention: “People end up thinking you can get good work for cheap, you can always find a cheaper way and it’s going to be just as good a result,” Larson said. “I would hope that Scott Walker is just as outraged about decreased quality of teachers that we’re going to get as he is with replacement refs in the NFL.” Of course, Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan decided to steer it in the other direction, correlating throwing the “failed” replacement officials out to throwing out incumbents.

That football could become a political…football in this way is a pretty fitting commentary on political discourse. More than one Grantland reader wrote in that Romney or Obama could seal the election by bringing the NFL’s officials back and there doesn’t seem to be a hint of irony in what they’re saying. Wisconsin teachers– you know, the people who have stand in front of dozens of heckling adolescents every day in the hopes of shaping their future– could apparently disappear tomorrow and not garner as much sympathy as a crew of people who measure ball distances at sporting events for a group of million-dollar athletes.

It’s unusual because sports fans, many fiscal conservatives among them, seem to be judging the current officiating fiasco by the standards of community interest rather than by the cold, hard bottom line that they judged the Wisconsin situation. While the NFL is a non-profit, its shutting out of the officials is at the behest of 97% privately owned teams that rake in hundreds of millions of dollars who provide a service that directly affects a fraction of the lives that teachers directly affect.

One would assume the community logic would apply to the public employees, not the wealthy businessmen. No one’s arguing that teachers and firefighters’ worth are measured by how many beer commercials a school can sell. The NFL , however, conducts business for the private owner’s profits and isn’t one logical tenet of late capitalist logic that you’re worth what the market says you’re worth? That being the case, the locked out referees aren’t worth that much: ratings are as high as ever.

The locked out officials can make somewhere between $25-70,000 but without benefits, something they want so they can drop their other jobs. This is for significantly less than nine and a half months of “official” work. Yet when teachers walked out to attend a protest, it wasn’t spun by fiscally conservative critics as the government’s fault that the quality of education might suffer, it was the teachers’ fault. They had to think about the economy, not the community. Whereas in 2012, it’s not the referee’s fault that their absence is hurting the quality of play, it’s the NFL’s…even though the NFL has no economic impetus whatsoever to change their stance. Apparently, the quality of NFL officiating is a community, not a capitalistic, concern.

And here we are, with Wisconsin at the center of the discontent. A strange, but not-so-strange, world indeed.

“World”-labelled music, “Punk”-labelled protest, “Student”-labelled journalism

I flipped the switch to CBC Radio on the way to work Wednesday and caught a spirited debate between British writer Ian Birrell and Toronto-based producer/director Derek Andrews on the subject of “world music.” Namely, the subject was “is this a useful term anymore?” and “might it be that this term is even just a tad bit offensive?” Birrell says “yes.” Andrews says “no,” although his argument seems pretty vague other than a rather half-hearted “how else are you going to describe (Artist A)?” near the end of the interview.

Birrell’s argument is a little bit of the old, a little bit of the new. For the old part of his argument: the “world music” term colonializes all that is not American (or alternately, Western) and essentially exocitizes all music is that isn’t the familiar “4/4 intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-lead-verse-chorus-outro” as some foreign “other.” It’s a fairly racialized concept: as white is the “default” setting, so too American and European music essentially become “default” when we place anything that Westerns remotely find “exotic” into a world bin.

In an oft-cited 2000 essay on the subject, ethnomusicologist Steven Feld captures much of this angst towards the “world music” label and even takes issue with the fact that I would categorize him as as “ethnomusicologist Steven Feld”:

“The relationship of the colonizing and the colonized thus remained generally intact in distinguishing music from world music. This musicology/ethnomusicology split reproduced the disciplinary divide so common in the academy, where unmarked “-ologies” announced studies of normative Western subjects, and “ethno-” fields were created to accommodate the West’s ethnic others. Even if little of this was terribly contentious in the academy of the 1960s and 1970s, it is nonetheless remarkable that the valorized labels ethnomusicology and world music survive with so little challenge at century’s end.”

Furthermore, he argues the term allows for global music to be neatly subsumed into the “market logic of expansion” and that “the dream desires of technological and artistic elites are jolted by market cycles of agitated wakefulness. Then, blanketed in promotion, they are once more cradled and lulled on a firm mattress of stark inequities and padded mergers, and nurtured at the corporate breast.”

The newer part of Birrell’s argument– and one that inadvertently compromises Feld’s argument– is that we “live in such a mashed up world” that what we understand as contemporary Western pop music is wearing the influences of what “world music” was coined to describe many eons ago (K’naan occupying much of this particular conversation), so what’s the use anymore? All this label is doing, he maintains, is steering people away from what could easily pass as a pop hit because it’s that “other,” it’s world music.

I’m a bit torn because my first instinct as a cultural critic is to completely support Birrell (and Feld) and say “hey, this ‘world music’ term isn’t just colonialist orientalism, it’s flat-out outdated.” However, I can’t help but feel that Andrews left out a pretty good counterargument, which is that there is some validity to seeking out a world music experience. Getting rid of “world music” might get rid of the “other,” but might it also be a “padded merger” of our listening experiences into something akin to “ah, it’s all just pop music?”

Ethnic Studies professor Roshanak Kheshti is critical of the “culture-vulture” fears surrounding “world music” labels describes “world music” as more of affective phenomenon than a tangible music genre. Is this the intended fantasy effect of a culture industry? Perhaps, Kheshti concedes. However, she also argues that to give up “world music” would be also to give up the aural imaginary pleasures the genre provides:

“There is a tension here that I am unable to negotiate between the pleasure offered by listening to the musical other, performing the musical other, and the discursive, imaginary, and political-economic formations that have structured me in relation to that object and the pleasure it affords…scholarship on world music, then, should aspire to not only critique the social structures that distinguish the bodies who produce affective labor from the bodies who consume it but also elucidate the psychic and affective processes that draw the bodies together in the first place.”

Kheshti’s idea of “touching sound” might be too estoeric to really sway Birrell but there is some validity to the idea of an aural imaginary. After all, music is so ridiculously subjective that you can’t deny the imaginary’s impact on how we receive it. Think of those terrible pop hits from your high school days that you “know you shouldn’t like” and that you’d probably hate if they came out ten years after you graduated…you like them in no small part because of the imaginary (but once real) world you’ve constructed around them. By removing “world music,” we may nobly avoid orientalizing the music of Asia, South America and so on and so forth, but we might also completely disassemble all of the different places in our mind that music can take us. After all, if the only imaginary we can construct around ANY music is a North American dance floor ready made for Feld’s “corporate beast,” are we any better off?

I do know that this interview has compelled this steak-and-potatoes college radio guy to seek out Tribe Called Red.

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Speaking of music, terms describing it and those terms’ implications…

I was intrigued by Melena Ryzik’s NY Times piece on the movement to support the Russian punk band Pussy Riot. Ryzik immediately touches a chord in rock fans by bringing up the whole “when did punk die?” trope which is pretty much a rite of passage for anyone professing to be a fan of loud music that starts with a ruffian screaming “1-2-3-4!” A prerequiste for many punk purists is that the music being played carry with it a certain sense of danger, a certain sense of unrefined amateurism, and a certain sense of agitation: we will disrupt so that something might change because of this music. And that last part in particular is what Ryzik argues has been missing from anything claiming or claimed to be punk…until now.

Ryzik is right about this much: Pussy Riot’s actions certainly were calibrated to be punk as defined by the aforementioned terms. There was an instant sense of danger as authorities descended upon them to prevent their actions. The music was loud and certainly required practically no training to perform. Most importantly, it was a blatant agitation intended to create change.

There’s no denying the disruption of this performance, which puzzles many that are critical of the outpouring of support. The most disruptive element of the performance is that it pretty blatantly violates the freedom of religious assembly frequently defended and cherished in the Western world. Its true disruption, however, is indicated by the punishment: if you broke into my church and disrupted service, I’d reserve the right to kick you out…you might get charged a fine for petty disruption. Not two years for hooliganism.

That last bit of sentencing detail is why columnists such as Rachel Marsden miss the mark on the whole Pussy Riot affair. Marsden writes “The longer game of subversion would have required them to spend years working to get into a key position within the power structure, then influencing and subverting the system to change what they don’t like. The effects of such an effort would have been more organic, credible and durable.”

Well, that wouldn’t be very punk, would it? Most subculural scholars agree with Dick Hebdige’s assessment that “Subcultures represent ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in the media. We should therefore not underestimate the signifying power of the spectacular subculture not only as a metaphor for potential anarchy ‘out there’ but as an actual mechanism of semantic disorder: a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation.” Pussy Riot was out to make noise and they made it; I’m not sure that anyone– critic or supporter– is “duped” by any of this.

Marsden further remarks that the band would have gotten further if “they intelligently addressed Mr. Putin’s policies without breaking any laws, or associated themselves with a larger group of activists known for flaunting it relentlessly and treating it as a joke.” This is familiar railing against the “carnival of protest”. I’m critical of when the carnival takes over for any valid political discussion but the fact that Pussy Riot’s actions have raised a spolight on the issue of censorship in Russia is, in and of itself, a sign that their critics are wrong. Surely there are some in Russia that are working within the power structure for the aforementioned gradual subversion, but expressions of “noise” often provide the spark that allow those on the inside to instigate change.

And it also continues the great punk tradition, which I would argue predates the term “punk” in the musical sense: demystifying the process and telling kids not to be intimidated by those that say you can’t. As the late Martin Rushent once said, “Go up there and make a hell of a noise. And make sure you play music your parents don’t like.”.

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It looked as though the Red & Black furor had reached a comfortable detente (and victory for the students). I was heartened to see the students stand by their adviser Ed Morales, someone who is well-respected and liked in the adviser community, and the general consensus those students had was “this wasn’t Ed’s idea and we know he supports our journalistic freedoms.” The Red and Dead website issued a “final statement” on Monday which seemed indicate that this was the end of it.

Yet it’s evident there are some bruised feelings– no longer from the students, but from some of those that sit/sat on the board. Board members are resigning and it’s not entirely clear why– unless it’s because they’re uncomfortable with the students having final say over the content. I’d like to think that’s not the reason. Ed Stampler’s resignation at least seemed thoughtful…almost an apology-resignation hybrid with a bit of recognition that stepping aside would be right for both him and them. However, Charles Russell’s resignation is a bit more cryptic, referring to something that the paper “is about to do” moreso than what it’s done.

It’s good news that the students’ grievances were addressed so quickly, especially when it’s considered a flagship for what student journalism should be. It’s bad news if any lingering ill-will should overshadows and/or extinguishes the ultimate lesson: Letting the students have their say is a good thing.