PopPolitics Weblog
a weekly roundup of pop culture and
politics in the news

Quote of the Week:
"Trying to turn Ralph Nader’s stentorian tones into something vaguely
groovy and musical was more of a challenge than taking someone who’s tone deaf
and trying to get them to sing ‘Rigoletto.’" 
- Producer Don Was on setting the campaign speeches of "Big Daddy
Ralph" to dance music for the release of "Public Citizen Number
One"   

source: Washington
Post 

Pop
Go the Candidates
Eric Weisbard of The Village Voice
presents an engaging analysis of the history of music on the campaign trail,
from the 19th century to the current candidates’ reluctance to follow in
Clinton’s sax-playing footsteps. 

"In this, the first election to feature two
baby boomer candidates, America is called upon to pick not just a leader, but a
successor to Bill Clinton as rock-and-roll president. But the wildness that
draws people to rock runs the risk of bringing scandal and disreputability down
upon politicians. Rock too much and you’re not presidential; don’t rock and
you’re not only "stiff," you’ve left grave doubts about your tastes.
So Bush and Gore dance around the issue like radio stations afraid to play a
nervy song that would turn off as many people as it turned on." 

While the mainstream candidates fret, Weisbard
notes that Ralph Nader, the anti-commercial candidate, has "made the most
effective use of popular culture of all." Weisbard cites the Rage Against the Machine video
‘Testify,’ directed by Michael Moore, and the Madison Square Garden rally that
featured Patti Smith, Eddie Vedder, Ani DiFranco and others. 

"The Nader finale was Smith’s ‘People Have the Power,’
which finally seemed other than impossibly corny in a political context where
popular participation was essential," writes Weisbard.

Plus: Rock
critic and author Robert Christgau picks
six great books about the history of popular music (Salon)

Live
From The White House! It’s Saturday Night!

"Based on their TV appearances already this campaign season, it wouldn"t be
crazy to expect that Al Gore and George W. Bush, before Nov. 7, will saute
crawfish with Emeril Lagasse, submit aged muskets for appraisal on Antiques Roadshow and guest star as the bickering gay couple down
the block on Everybody Loves Raymond, writes Steve Johnson of the Chicago
Tribune. 

Johnson acknowledges that the candidates’ appearances on Oprah and Letterman
yielded some surprising, and important, responses, but he believes Bush and Gore sunk to an
all-time low when they taped parodies of their debate performances for Saturday
Night Live.  "[T]his SNL appearance, seeming to mock the very
idea of substantive discussion, is troubling, especially when you try to imagine
the potential upside for the candidates. If you don’t win the election, Lorne
Michaels might cast you as Tim Meadows’ sidekick in Ladies’ Man II?

Life
Imitates Art Imitates Life
Allison Janney and Joe Lockhart chatted about their respective jobs in The
New York Times Magazine (she plays C.J. Cregg, the dynamic White House press
secretary on The West Wing; Lockhart was, until recently, the real
White House press secretary). Here’s the beginning exchange: 

Q: How
has viewing each other’s performance changed the way you each do your job?
Lockhart: I don’t think it affected the way I did my job. The benefit of the
show is that it has helped people see us as real people. It’s kind of odd,
because you needed fake people in order to do that.
Janney: We make you look good, huh?
Lockhart: Yeah, that’s something I’m never going to forget. In the season
premiere I saw a little bit of myself in the absolute look of disdain on C.J.’s
face when a dumb question was asked. Maybe you can’t learn that; you have to
have it naturally. That was a pretty good dirty look. I liked it.

Plus: From the same issue of the magazine,
Charles
McGrath looks at authors who, despite their age and the age of their
well-known characters, are still writing novels about relationships and sex.
Consider Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow. "Novels, and realistic
novels especially, are supposed to tell us about ourselves, and we are, as the
experts keep reminding us, a graying population. We live longer, we enjoy better
health and at middle age we, like the people in these novels, are unwilling to
exit gracefully from the stage," writes McGrath.

Morality
Play On Culture 
Commenting on the soul-searching conversations and gray-area dilemmas that are
an integral part of many television dramas, Ken Parish Perkins of the Star-Telegram
writes that many shows use dialogue "as a kind of postmortem for what it
means to be a doctor - or a lawyer or a cop or even a vampire cursed with a soul
- in a difficult and troubling world."

"[Hill Street] Blues, which
ran from 1981 to 1987, stood in stark contrast to, say, Dragnet 25 years
earlier. As such, it measured pop culture’s journey from the absolutist - and
largely false - morality of the 1950s to the much messier gray-area ethics that
most of us actually live with. This new morality is less reassuring in its
premise that we are all - even heroes - sinners. But it does hit home much more
readily, with its post-modern twist that our failings are cause for sorrow
rather than condemnation. (Witness the willingness of many to separate Bill
Clinton the president from Bill Clinton the philanderer.)," writes Perkins.

"This isn’t to say that viewers of these
dramas necessarily embrace moral relativism, but it does suggest that they
experience a kind of catharsis in watching the melancholy travails of their TV
characters," he adds. "And the ratings successes of many of these shows stand in direct
contrast to notions of the dumbing-down or moral bankruptcy of America. People ‘are’
thinking about the difficult moral and ethical issues in society, and more than
that, they ‘want’ to think about them." 

Plus: Greg Baxton of the L.A. Times on why City
of Angels
is labeled a "black drama" and Gideon’s Crossing is seen as
an intense medical drama, although both are centered on African American actors
and feature multicultural casts.

Appearance
Matters
Judith Shulevitz of Slate reports on the retrospective of Giorgio
Armani’s clothes at Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum. Though the show favors
celebrity endorsements over social context or fashion history, Shulevitz
discusses how Armani’s deconstruction of the suit jacket in 1974 
"[H]elped to bridge the gap between denim-clad members of the counterculture
and the stuffy establishmentarians of the professional world … When it came to
women’s clothing, his social foresight was equally keen. Women wanted to compete
in the workplace? He altered the suit, the basic unit of male power, by adding
shawl collars and drawstrings and other feminine touches, without losing the
androgynous mystique that women thought they needed to be taken seriously."

Appearance
Matters (Part II) 

Sony PlayStation 2 wasn’t the only long-awaited sequel to debut
this week. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 also came to town. Most critics
gave mixed reviews at best to the follow-up to The Blair Witch Project phenomenon. 

Rick Groen of The Globe and Mail writes that director Joe Berlinger
"starts in reality, and then layers in the artifice - a wackload of cheesy
artifice borrowed from movies past. En route, the screenplay pretends to examine
larger themes - the supernatural horror around us versus the psychological
horror within, the tenuous link between media violence and the real thing, the
fallacy that video is more trustworthy than film. But it’s just a pretense.
These highbrow issues get swallowed up in the lowbrow drama. … By eroding the
‘reality base’ of The Blair Witch Project, he’s removed the one quality,
the appearance of authenticity, that made it interesting - the very quality
audiences are now responding to on screens large and small." 

Only three more months to go until Survivor 2.

 - Christine Cupaiuolo

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Quote of the Week:
"Whatever spin you put on it, The West Wing has delivered the
best image upgrade that both politics and popular culture have seen all year." 
Kristin Tillotson 
source: Minneapolis
Star Tribune (Oct. 15)

Still
A Vast Wasteland?
Lois Romano of the Washington Post asks: "So here it is 19 days
until the closest presidential election in decades, and where are the candidates
today?" Just turn on your television. Vice President Al Gore visited Regis
Philbin and showed him how to hypnotize a chicken and later taped an appearance
with Rosie O’Donnell. Gov. George W. Bush did Late Night with David
Letterman. Sen. Joe Lieberman also showed up on Regis’ show; instead of
singing he recited the lineup of the Brooklyn Dodgers from the 1950s. Both
presidential candidates taped debate parodies of themselves for a future Saturday
Night Live special. "The shows offer candidates the opportunity to show
themselves as regular guys and to deliver unfiltered messages to millions of
viewers - particularly women," writes Romano.

David
Letterman pitched tougher questions (and more follow-ups) to Bush
than many reporters on the campaign trail, writes Salon’s Jake Tapper.
From the death penalty to air pollution, Letterman stuck with Bush, inserting
his trademark humor just enough to keep the show from resembling a Sunday
morning talk show. Bush flubbed his first appearance with Letterman (when he
appeared via satellite). This visit was a redemption of sorts. 

This
Just In: Joking Is Serious
Is the presidential race making you laugh? You’re not alone. The number of
political jokes recited by the likes of Letterman, Jay Leno, John Stewart and
Bill Maher has increased in the past decade. Matthew Curry, a George Washington University
student, gets paid $7 per hour to watch video tapes of the late night shows and
catalogue the jokes for the Center for Media and Public Affairs. The "Entertainment
Study" aims to monitor the influence of late-night comics on the nation’s
political discourse, writes Dana Milbank in the Washington Post.

Although the jokes have become part of the
political discourse, as Dan Rather, the Associated Press and The New York Times
all keep track, "[T]here’s no evidence that this actually
has any impact on the way people vote. For its years of studying and counting
late-night political jokes, the Center for Media and Public Affairs hasn’t found
any links between the jokes about a candidate and the candidate’s electoral
success," writes Milbank. Still, Bob Lichter, who runs the research center,
isn’t laughing: "It’s one small blip in the gradual decline of Western
civilization," he says about all the joking. "There’s no distinction
anymore between news and popular culture." Geez. We didn’t think it was that
bad. 

He
Said/She Said
The voice emanating from your computer or car in the future is more likely
to sound like your father than your girlfriend. In a story by Anne Eisenberg of The
New York Times, researchers acknowledge that gender stereotypes and cultural
expectations play a large role in determining the types of voices companies are
likely to incorporate. 

"Our studies show that directions from a
female voice are perceived as less accurate than those from a male voice, even
when the voices are reading the exact same directions. Deepness helps, too. It
implies size, height and authority. Deeper voices are more credible," said Dr.Clifford Nass,
a Stanford University professor who has studied how people react to
voices. 

Caroline Henton, a researcher for Tellme Networks
counters that listener’s prejudices should be contested rather than accepted. "This is really a question of listeners
equating machines with human beings who are being understood to perform servile
functions," she said. "To support that without questioning is
essentially to uphold the bastion of male social power." 

Plus: A
graduate student at the University of Indiana sees gender stereotypes being
reinforced on TV. Xiaoquan "Kevin" Zhao studied 55 hours of dramas and
comedies on the four networks, seeking to determine how characters spoke to each
other. According to Marc D. Allen of The Indianapolis Star, "Zhao
counted the number of times characters interrupted and corrected each other and
found that men interrupted far more often than women. They also were interrupted
more than women. Men tended to interrupt more to give their opinions; women to
offer facts." 

"My data suggest that while
women might be put into the same (job) positions as men (on TV), they’re not
really put into that kind of power because they’re not expressing
themselves," Zhao said. "In working situations, men still tend to be
dominant. Women are more dominant in a social setting."

"I think the representation of
reality in television is a very important thing to look at," he said.
"… The viewers, by observing those television characters, can construct
their perception of reality. They would think: ‘OK, that’s the way men usually
speak. Men are assertive. They are constantly interrupting others.’ "

But
What About The Honeymoon?
Conservative radio host Dennis Praeger argues in The National Review that
the reason single women vote Democrat is because the they view the government as a
"surrogate husband." "Most women have a primal desire to be
protected …" writes Praeger. "Whether because of evolution,
socialization, nature, divine design, or an amalgam of all of these, women have
a powerful need to feel secure (the shift of American priorities from liberty to
security can be regarded as one example of the feminization of American
society). For the vast majority of women in history this need was met through
marriage. That is why almost no woman marries ‘down.’" 

Praeger probably doesn’t think highly of Samantha, the unabashedly sexual
character on HBO’s Sex and the City. New York magazine’s cover
story, "Single in the City" features an
interview with the actress Kim Cattrall who plays Samantha. "Never has
a woman character so brazenly, and unapologetically, taken the world quite
literally by the balls, gotten what she wants on a nightly basis, and not been
stabbed to death or otherwise tortured for it," writes Lisa Depaulo. A
writer for the show adds: "I think this type of woman is so fresh that the
only way people can relate to her is to pretend she’s a man." The issue
also includes a
night on the town with an upscale matchmaker who specializes in finding
"glamorous, smart, skinny, feminine, soft-spoken women" for
high-paying clients.

Draft
Bartlet
TV critics are having a difficult time avoiding making comparisons between
Josiah Bartlet, the straight-shooting, family-minded, liberal president played
by Martin Sheen, and the current presidential race. "This election year, life should imitate art, with all candidates
taking cues from the brilliant strategists of The West Wing.
Bartlet’s fictitious administration engages people because it is unabashedly
idealistic. It bulldozes over smokescreen issues to tackle what matters. And
most importantly, it does not underestimate the American public," writes
Kristin Tillotson of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

"It’s a bit too risky - in a race this close, anyway - for a real presidential candidate to admit to
being influenced by such a trifle as a TV drama. Still, I couldn’t help thinking
that Gore’s forthright, no-strings apology in the second debate for getting some
facts wrong in the first seemed a lot like something Josiah Bartlet would do,"
she adds. Now there’s wishful thinking. 

In another wishful
piece, Joyce Millman of Salon writes: "With
the presidential election three weeks away, it’s clear that America has finally
decided that the best man for the job is … a TV character." Calling
Bartlet the "POTUS with the mostest," Milman says the show has caught
on with viewers because it is "an optimistic show. It insists that
politicians don’t have to be jaded or spineless, and that it’s not futile for
people to get involved in politics or work for a cause." And, it’s got
great acting.  

Plus: The
West Wing: Leader of the Free World (Free TV, That Is) from The New
York Times

Briefly Noted: 
Chicago
Alderman Walter Burnett Jr., who served two years for armed robbery, teams
up with a rap artist to tell his story. The song is appropriately titled "A
Changed Man." (from Chicago Tribune)
Rage
Against the Machine singer Zack de la Rocha has called it quits. The band’s
”decision making process has completely failed,” he said in a statement. ”It
is no longer meeting the aspirations of all four of us collectively as a band,
and from my perspective, has undermined our artistic and political ideal."
Lori Reese of Entertainment Weekly suggests Ralph Nader as a replacement.

 - Christine Cupaiuolo

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Quote of the Week:
"The point is, politics and entertainment - especially TV - are
increasingly mixed. Or hasn’t anyone else noticed Gore’s makeup job?" 
Bill Goodykoontz 
source: The
Arizona Republic (Oct. 11)

You
Know You’ve Arrived When ... 
Will & Grace moved into the coveted Thursday 9 p.m. slot on NBC this
week, the position once held by Seinfeld. Virginia Rohan of the Bergen
Record writes, "Will & Grace has become such an industry
darling that the networks are scrambling to develop gay sitcoms. More amazing is
the reason for industry response: American TV viewers, seemingly ahead of
society as a whole, have accepted the homosexuality of witty lawyer Will Truman
(Eric McCormack) and his over-the-top pal Jack." 

Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman surprised viewers
during the vice
presidential debate when both said they were rethinking their views about
gay marriage and struggling with how to provide equal rights for gays and
lesbians. Conservatives, naturally, were displeased with Cheney’s comments,
particularly when he said, "I think the fact of the matter of course is
that matters regulated by the states — I think different states are likely to
come to different conclusions and that’s appropriate."  

During the second
presidential debate, George W. Bush made it clear he is against same-sex
marriage. Al Gore (naturally) agreed, then added: "But I think that we
should find a way to allow some kind of civic unions, and I basically agree with
Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman. And I think the three of us have one view, and
the governor has another view."

In Vermont, Patrick Buchanan visited the farm where the “Take Back Vermont” movement (a movement to put more decision-making power into the hands of people) began and spoke against the state’s civil union law. Buchanan said Vermont was the scene of a “major skirmish” in a “cultural war going on for the soul of this country,” reports David Gram of the Associated Press.
Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune reports that since the law took effect July 1, Vermont has granted 809 civil union licenses, 600 of which have gone to out-of-state residents.

Plus: Radio and television talk show host Dr.
Laura Schlessinger apologized, sort of, in a full-page advertisement.
Schlessinger, who has previously condemned the lifestyle of gays and lesbians,
conceded that "in talking about gays and lesbians, some of my words were
poorly chosen."

Home
Is Where The Rap Is
Is gangsta rap getting family friendly? The Washington Post asks that
question in a story about rap artists converging on Washington for the Million
Family March. "It’s cool to talk about family, or it’s much cooler
now," says Russell Simmons, the one-man hip-hop conglomerate and co-founder
of Def Jam Records. "I’m hopeful that this event will make it even
cooler." Snoop Dog, Jay-Z, DMX and Wu-Tang Clan are all expected to attend.
"This outbreak of domesticity isn’t that surprising. Many of these
performers are married and have kids, of course, and occasionally they rap about
the joys of child-rearing and abiding love," writes David Segal. 

Do(ug)h!
Tom Maurstad of The Dallas Morning News celebrates The Simpsons‘
10th anniversary noting that the show is both "television as its coolest
and most cutting-edge" and "television at its most commercial and
exploited." Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, since the commercials,
promotions and corporate tie-ins have often been as funny as the show. "In
today’s consumer culture, selling out is no longer a sin. In fact, selling out
is just fine. It’s even good ” the whole point, really. The only sin is in
selling out stupidly or without any style. You see this inside-outing of the old
cultural order, the commercializing of cool, all over the media map ” the
transformation of the Internet into a dot.com marketplace, for instance. But as
with so many pop culture trends, television is ground zero," writes
Maurstad.

It’s
A Small World After All
Interracial and multi-ethnic couples are showing up in more commercials, a
trend that’s likely to increase when data from the 2000 census — the first to
allow people to list more than one racial or ethnic origin — is released two
years from now. "The trend has long been reflected in movies and more
recently in TV shows. Interracial romance has been portrayed as open-minded in Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner?, tortured in ER, hip in Ally McBeal,
and dangerous in The West Wing," writes Thomas Ginsberg of The
Philadelphia Inquirer. "But advertisements bring the image to a new
level of acceptance by portraying interracial couples as consumers similar to
anybody else - untroubled by anything other than thirst, hunger, dirty clothes,
clunky cars."

Get
Your Motor Running 
Is there anything worse than being viewed as a Chevy station wagon? That,
apparently, is Gore’s fate, as male voters link the vice president to cars that
are "safe and kind of boxy" (think Ford Taurus and Volvos) while Bush
is viewed as a Maserati or Mustang convertible, according to Garry South, the
chief political aide for California Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat. Todd S. Purdum
of The New York Times writes that while both candidates are pitching
themselves to women voters by showing off their sensitive sides on shows like Oprah,
Bush’s masculinity is still safely intact; Gore is trailing Bush among male
voters by up to 22 points, according to one national poll.

While we’re on the subject of gender, a Harvard psychiatry professor and two
colleagues who studied why
men are so much more concerned about their bodies than they were 50 years
ago put forth this hypothesis: threatened masculinity. "As women have
entered the work force and become heads of families, men have had to relinquish
their traditional roles as fathers, soldiers and breadwinners, the authors
speculated, which leaves their bodies as the only way to demonstrate their
masculinity," Emily Eakin writes in The New York Times. The findings
have been published in "The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body
Obsession" (Free Press). One interesting point: the number of ads showing
men shedding their clothes in Glamour and Cosmopolitan jumped from
less than 5 percent in 1950 to as much as 35 percent in the 90’s. The percentage
of undressed females didn’t change.

And this commercial just heard on TV: "Amstel
Light — Think of it as the light beer that’s not in touch with its feminine
side."

Here She Is … Again
In a tribute to the annual Miss America contest, we look at several stories
about this year’s pageant.
  
Miss
America is Back Atop the Pedestal Gwen Florio of the Houston Chronicle
wonders why young women are still apt to put a premium on good looks. "Wait
a minute — female candidates are winning Senate seats, women’s soccer teams are
filling stadiums, and a beauty queen is a role model?" writes Florio, who
refers to post-feminist drive for beauty as the "I’m smart and a babe
phenomenon," ala Ally McBeal.

Checking
Out the Competition Megan Rosenfeld of the Washington Post relates an
amusing tale of her trip to Atlantic City  — with her teenager daughter –
to watch the preliminary rounds and interview the contestants. "Miss
Florida, one of the two (baton) twirlers here, says there is a move on to make
it an Olympic sport. And I say, more power to them. She learned twirling from
her mother, and on the Fourth of July the two of them flip flaming batons in
their driveway. Wow! ‘Cool,’ says my daughter. But she says it in a way that
means she’s trying to be polite. She is not as admiring of baton-twirling as I
am," writes Rosenfeld.

Missed
New York And for an up-close look at beauty pageants, Salon turned to
Julie Pham, who competed in the Miss New York pageant but blew her chances when
she took the advice "They’re looking for authenticity this year" to
heart, and revealed to the judges that she directed a documentary about college
students who fund their education through prostitution. The clincher?
"Although it seems unlikely, because they are polar institutions, I noticed
a parallel between escort agencies and beauty pageants — girls financing their
education by capitalizing on their feminine potential as women." Pham lost
to a "statuesque health fanatic with the Fitness for Kids platform."

 - Christine Cupaiuolo

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