When I was in high school back in the Dark Ages we didn’t have music video channels. Kinda like today. But we did have this great show called The Midnight Special, which came on late Friday nights. In addition to live performances by a tremendous range of artists, it also emerged as the place where you could see music videos before we even knew to call them music videos.

The guy who really figured this “video” thing out first, I think, was David Bowie. If you’ve seen pictures from his Ziggy Stardust era you know that he clearly understood the impact of the rock visual years before anyone else. And The Midnight Special was the place where I first saw some of Bowie’s great rock film efforts. I wonder how many future music artists and film students were watching right along with me. Full story »

by greg stene, ph.d.

As I recall things – a while back, an excellent TV sitcom, NewsRadio, had an episode where a local publication rated the performance of the staff on the fictional radio station. The way-bombastic character Bill McNeal, played by the now dead and then-incredible Phil Hartman, was rated, “adequate.” True to his nature, Bill began boasting of his fantastic adequacy. He knew the rating sucked, but maybe building it up might make others think otherwise.

The episode could have been speaking about today’s level of creativity in advertising.

Adequate. And proud of it. Full story »

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, believes that a Yahoo / Microsoft tie-up would be awful for the Internet. Schmidt issued the vague sequitur that we should all beware of, “the things that it has done that have been so difficult for everyone.” Of course, everyone knows that Microsoft is the Great Satan, so it stands to reason that anything they do should be regarded as automatically the equivalent of making baby stew.

Here, though, it is Google – owner of 62.9% of all Internet searches ($16.4 bn in ad revenue) – which dwarfs any tie up (Yahoo-Microsoft have a combined search share of 15.7% and $ 9.8 bn in ad revenue). Could it be that Google is trying to pull a Microsoft and protect its home-turf advantage from a healthy rival? Full story »

Newly minted New York governor David Paterson and his wife had extra-marital affairs. Former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey says he and his wife, Dina Matos McGreevey, engaged in three-way sex with his ex-aide and driver; Mrs. McGreevey says they didn’t. Meanwhile, the McGreeveys’ high-profile, salacious divorce case remains nightly news in the Garden State.

The dissection of disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, continues. On “Larry King Live,” a 15-minute, 47-second segment discusses how to catch cheating spouses.

CNN’s “Quick Vote” question today asks: “If a politician is unfaithful in his or her private life, do you think that impacts their ability to be honest in public life?” (At this writing, 54 percent voted yes.)

And it’s ho, ho, ho everywhere as “serious” journalists interview prostitutes, including discussion of their high-tech improvements and former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss proclaiming, “Dude, these are men.”
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Sen. Barack Obama today delivered what will hopefully be remembered as an important speech in the history of American race relations. It is proper, as he notes, that race (and class) should be dominant topics in our political campaigns because they are so central to who we are (and to why we fail).

However, it is unacceptable, at this moment in our history, that race should be an issue of division, especially among “progressives.” Full story »

How could Eliot Spitzer be so stupid? What made him risk everything he worked and stood for? How could he betray his wife, his children, and the citizens of New York, not to mention idealists everywhere?

We’ve got this whole thing backwards. The more relevant — and realistic — question is: How could he have been anything but that stupid?

In other words, why wouldn’t Eliot Spitzer buy a 22-year-old?

He had rationalizations by the bushel-full with which to regale himself:

I’m a super-achiever with big appetites. Isn’t it all part of the same package? Full story »