Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Listener sponsored radio is one of the few mass media outlets remaining that resembles democracy in America. Corporate advertising driven TV, radio and newspapers are full of fluff and omissions and are products of professional entertainers, posers and profiteers. Let us not forget our basic freedoms of speech and the press, unless we lose them.

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to a number of outstanding public radio stations that are frequently in need of support, listed below. Please do what you can, and preserve human sanity. Thank you.

KPFA 94.1 FM: Founded in 1949 by Lewis Hill, a pacifist, poet, and journalist, KPFA was the first community supported radio station in the USA. Much of KPFA’s programming is local, original and eclectic, with a well produced mix of news and in depth public affairs, an ongoing drama, literature and performance series, interviews, and reviews. My personal favorite programs are Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, Sunday Salon with Larry Bensky, and Flashpoints with Dennis BernStein.

KQED Public Radio: NPR and local programming, such as Forum with Michael Krasny.

KCSM The Bay Area’s Jazz Station. KCSM Jazz 91 FM houses one of the USA’s largest collections of jazz recordings, and plays a wide variety of commercially uninterupted jazz music. This station is a great treasure with a lot of heart and soul.

KXPR 90.9 FM is part of Sacramento’s Capital Public Radio and plays a steady stream of fine classical music.

The howling idiot wind of the Republican noise machine is in danger of drowning itself out. With so many lies and explanations for poor intelligence swirling around, how’s a hysterical shrieking banshee to distinguish herself and make a living here? You produce a provocative title such as Ann Coulter’s upchucking, I mean upcoming, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. Holy Cow, are we back on the first grade playground again? I had been musing that some creative events might be planned for 6-6-6 day, but the June 6th release of a template for condemning millions of souls was beyond my sweet little imagination. She really must be nuts.

To cast out the demons from Ms. Coulter’s troubled mind, I recommend religious scholar Garry Willis’s book, What Jesus Meant. On a recent radio interview Willis placed Jesus above politics and systems of justice. He quotes Jesus as saying, “What you do to the least of these, you do to me.” This should be enough warning to the intolerant, holier than thou, would-be Christians.

But listen up people, when a Conservative says it’s true, it’s just true. Believe it, or else you have no faith and are Godless.

Today’s SF Chronicle is running an article about the growth and diversity of Internet video content. They include a list, and here are some of the hyperlinks to the sites. See the democratization of television on the march.

• YouTube – looks like flickr for videos
• Current TV – an ambitious user created video content network offering payment for your uploaded video projects.
• vMix – videos submitted and ranked from around the world
• vidiLife – yet another way to share videos with your friends
• Ourmedia – this one appears to have a socially conscious edge
• Break.com – kind of sleazy and commercial brand of site
• FireAnt – pioneering videoblogging
• Veoh – invitation to submit your videos. Clips from copyrighted films such as Coppola’s Dementia 13.
• GorillaMask.net – slick, sexy, commercial regurgitation of primarily professional mass media
• Grouper – a place to upload and share your videos from
• GUBA – enables images and video through good old Usenet
• Podzinger – an index of audio and video for podcasting

Congratulations to the little guys! John Canemaker and Peggy Stern won an Oscar for Best Animated Short film, The Moon And The Son, at the 78th Academy Awards last night, beating out the mighty Pixar’s One Man Band. The handwriting is on the wall that the psychological expression of hand drawn animation is the real treasure, since 3-D computer animation has become as common and all pervasive as video games.

Luma Pictures recently produced 200 monstrously realistic visual effects shots of vampires and werewolves for the recent horror movie UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION. Apple’s web site has a good write up of the software and visual effects techniques of Luma’s artists on Underworld, Crash and The Cave. The 3-D modeling, animation and compositing is very high end.

Luma’s work generated a VFX Forum discussion which includes an excited artist bubbling over his first film experience. Looking at the trailer I am too removed from the excitement. With all the real life horrors in the world, what is so scary about this old fashioned hocus pocus stuff?

Loose Change 2nd Edition is a hard hitting, provocative 9/11 documentary that can be viewed at Google Video. The observations in the documentary are highly disturbing, which many Americans would prefer not to believe: that the 9/11 was a staged event by our own government to create a Pearl Harbor II as a pretext for Middle Eastern wars, political power grabs, gold, insider stock profits and insurance money.

The documentary covers these 9/11 mysteries:

• a missile-like hole in the Pentagon and lack of aircraft debris.
• black box flight recorders not retrieved.
• lack of aircraft debris or bodies found at Pennsylvania “crash” site.
• explosion evidence at base of twin towers, far from aircraft initial impact.
• evidence of controlled demolition explosions at WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7.
• inability of cell phones on aircraft to contact phones on ground.

The stomach turning implications, if proven out, would of course be the horror story of the century. The documentary suggests that there are clues that could be tracked down, such as accused hijackers may still be alive, aircraft victims may still be alive, because planes were switched, and the list of deep, dark secrets goes on and on. Could so many innocent people be sacrificed for such a ruse? Could so many Americans be fooled? Who knows?

Online resources such as Killtown.org have collected theories and evidence.

Update:  New York Magazine’s article, The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll.

Today on the KQED radio program Forum, documentary filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker (“Don’t Look Back”), Richard Leacock, Stephen Ujlaki, director of the Documentary Film Institute at SF State University, and Dan Krauss, Bay Area filmmaker whose film “The Death of Kevin Carter” is nominated for an Academy Award discussed their craft. Part of their debate was if the documentary filmmaker should be a “fly on the wall” or not.

My own experience shooting photographs of rock bands performing in small clubs is that the performers know you are there and they know how to act. As a photographer I’ve felt the need to be “cold blooded” in order to best capture a moment. The focus is on the technical aspects of the film, lighting, camera and lens fitting the subject into the frame. A good photographer calmly and cooly stalks the great image and can only indulge in emotional reactions after it has been successfully captured. I know people who have flown to war zones in order to find “great” photographs, and that is not for me.

Dan Krauss discussed the dilemma of whether or not to become in involved in the subject matter, explored in his Oscar nominated documentary short about photographer Kevin Carter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his picture (above) of a Sudan famine victim above. Mr. Carter was haunted by the photo and committed suicide, tormented by his conscience and other critics for exploiting the suffering of others.

Computer animation artwork based on fractal flocking logic by Spot Draves. From his Dreams In High Fidelity web site:

A Painting that Evolves:

Physically Dreams In High Fidelity consists of a small computer driving a large liquid crystal or plasma display. The computer creates a continuously morphing, non-repeating, abstract animation.

This work stretches the definition of “painting,” in this case, a computer rendering math logic onto electronic displays. I believe the legion of painters from Picasso on back to the cave dwellers might argue in favor of the hand rendered definition of painting, whereas this is a robotic automaton spitting electronic fire.