Terry Gross

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Top Ten Videos of 2010: 6. The Daily Show, “Male Inequality”

January 2, 2011 | Comment

2010 was a big year for Jon Stewart, and thereby for The Daily Show. I didn’t think Stewart could top the October 30 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear he and Stephen Colbert led, which drew a crowd of over 200,000 to the National Mall in Washington.

billboard

Billboard welcoming RNC attendees to
Minneapolis in 2008
(Photo: Flickr/The Zeppelin)

As it turned out, Stewart outdid himself in December with an impassioned shredding of Senate Republicans’ unconscionable filibuster of the Zadroga Act to provide medical and financial aid to afflicted Ground Zero emergency workers.1

In 2010 The Daily Show also continued to do one of the things it has done brilliantly for several years: point out and mock people who claim to be oppressed, but clearly aren’t. Examples of such people might include certain investment bankers, Christian mega-churches, professional athletes, or many others that generally have it pretty good. In the case of my number six video of 2010, this treatment is given to a richly deserving group: middle-aged white men.2

Samantha Bee, the Daily Show correspodent in this segment, has long been one of my favorites. She had a few things of her own going on in 2010, most notably the publication of her memoir I Know I Am, But What Are You? Her promotion of the book included a wide-ranging interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air and a cute feature piece in the New York Times Magazine. Daily Show video clips featuring her are here; among those that especially crack my shit up are “Shame Parade,” “John McCain’s Air Quotes” (start at about 2:03 into the clip), and “Long Island Wants to Secede.”


Got You Covered: “Oops! …I Did It Again”

March 20, 2010 | Permalink

I know. I thought it too: “Really? That song?” I’m sure there are plenty of you out there who have thought you’d be perfectly content to never hear it again. On the other hand, there may be some who either can’t recall or somehow escaped hearing Britney Spears’ original rendition. So if you’re curious, here’s a taste.

thompson

Photo: Flickr/Bryan Ledgard

But check it out — this synthetic, plasticized swan is improbably re-shaped into an ugly-in-a-good-way duckling by the British folk-rock journeyman Richard Thompson. His vocal approach — aggressive, and more than a little bitter — turns kittenish teen-pop into a sardonic challenge. To cap it off, Thompson bends the song to his will with his virtuosic guitar interludes, at one point even shifting it temporarily into 6/8 time. All in all, it’s been enough to banish the Britney Spears version from my mind’s ear… but I don’t purport to predict its effect on others. Judge for yourselves: Read the rest of this entry »


Facebook Meme-esque Movie Quiz, Part II

October 13, 2009 | 1 comment

The moment you’ve all been waiting for has arrived. Here it is, the thrilling conclusion of the quiz from Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule which I began in the post before this one. Let’s get right to the action:

  1. Best Film of 1979.
    Absolutely, definitely, unequivocally Manhattan.

  2. Most realistic and/or sincere depiction of small-town life in the movies.
    The one that made the biggest impression on me was All the Real Girls.
  3. Best horror movie creature (non-giant division).
    Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook Meme: 25 Things About Me

January 28, 2009 | 11 comments

This little Facebook meme has found its way to me. OK, what am I supposed to do?

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

I’ll do it, and I’ll send it to the friends who tagged me in theirs, but no way am I going to require 25 of my Facebook friends to write lists too. My friends have more important things to do… well, most of them, anyway.

25 Random Things About Me

  1. I am a compulsive copy editor and a remorseless grammar nazi (in case you hadn’t noticed).
  2. I am geeky enough to use HTML markup when posting things on community web sites. In case you still hadn’t noticed.
  3. I’m seriously considering getting a bicycle to use for getting around town, in order to both save money on gas and get more exercise. The only drawback I foresee is the increased chance of severe injury due to LA’s shortage of bike lanes and surplus of reckless drivers.

    4. Read the rest of this entry »


Disunifying Theory

July 16, 2006 | 4 comments

As is often the case, there’s an episode of Fresh Air with Terry Gross that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. Actually two episodes, but I think of them as one. I’ll explain.

terry

I’d listen to Terry Gross interview a
doorknob.

Among the many reasons I find Fresh Air consistently fascinating are the occasional segments by Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist who formerly taught at Stanford University and now is on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley.1 I am partial to most anything related to language, as I’ve indicated elsewhere. Further exciting my interest is the way that Nunberg investigates the vernacular of today’s popular media. The June 29th episode of Fresh Air contained a short Nunberg commentary on the extreme pronouncements of conservative pundits and the effect they have had on what now passes for political discourse. On the July 6th program he was given a full interview wherein he expounded further upon the same subject, which apparently forms the core of his new book Talking Right (which carries the lengthy but colorful subtitle, How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show).

nunberg

Geoff Nunberg, looking very
book-jackety.

Hearing Mr. Nunberg’s thesis touched off a bit of a mental conflagration, my mind cycling through observations collected over recent months and years, tracking new associations between seemingly disparate elements. There’s a whole lot of shit to think about here, and I’ll be doing so for a long time yet. My sense of things is that Nunberg’s observations serve to underscore a fundamental characteristic of our society at the present moment: the sheer volume of information that pervades our lives in this Information Age does not draw us together as an informed community — it isolates us from one another.

There are as many messages available on a given subject as there are channels on a satellite TV service, or movie critics on Rotten Tomatoes, or WordPress blogs.2 Having this many options is a marvelous thing, with the only catch being that it necessitates critical thinking. Critical thinking is hard. When you’re pleasantly flopped onto the sofa with a beverage after a long day at work, and your remote comes to rest on Ann Coulter in time to hear her say that liberals believe in Darwinian evolution because they see at as carte blanche to kill, maim and oppress under the guise of “survival of the fittest,” critical thinking is downright inconvenient. It’s easy to see why the average viewer would be more likely to just keep watching and listening, rather than risk missing whatever bold condemnation she might utter next in order to ask him or herself, “What evidence could Ann Coulter provide to support such a claim? Has she interviewed scores of left-wing criminals who all cited Darwin as a moral get-out-of-jail-free card?”

Many have remarked upon the major media outlets’ shift into presenting news material as entertainment. Since politics has always been a major subset of news reporting, I suppose it is not surprising that its treatment in the news media is now less about journalism than it is about show business. It’s political discourse in which the intended response is not more discursing (so to speak), but plain old cursing. It may counterproductive to the course of our nation, but hey — the Nielsen ratings are terrific.