Saturday, July 21, 2007

The Eyes of Tammy Faye

As it happens, just a few weeks ago I saw The Eyes of Tammy Faye. From the July 2000 NYtimes review of the film:

Tammy Faye Bakker was a co-host of ‘’The Jim and Tammy Show,’’ but she also produced her own programs, including the daily ‘’Tammy Faye’s House Party,’’ where she entertained guests, offered advice on homemaking and shopping, staged fashion shows, danced, sang and made fudge.

Speaking by telephone, the Rev. Mel White, a gay Christian advocate who (before coming out as gay) worked closely with many of the major televangelists, explained her appeal: ‘’For the evangelical community she was Dr. Joyce Brothers, Martha Stewart and Carol Burnett, all rolled into one.’’

But ‘’The Eyes of Tammy Faye’’ also reveals a more radical Tammy, who was the host of shows on controversial topics like penile implants, interviewed a gay minister with AIDS in the earliest days of public debate about the illness and reached out to drug addicts and others excluded by the broader evangelical community.

Mr. White is convinced that, for PTL’s largely rural, female and older audience, Tammy Faye Bakker provided an image of empowerment.

‘’Her fans were people who grew up in a very fundamentalist tradition,’’ he said, ‘’not being able to wear makeup, or dance, or go out in public. So here comes Tammy, with her dyed hair and makeup, her ebullient spirit and outspoken ways with both men and women. She talked about sex, and flirted with Jimmy. She took on the caricature of an obedient wife, and blasted it. You have never seen Pat Robertson’s wife, or Jerry Falwell’s wife. They stay at home, doing what those wives do.’’

Tammy Faye dead at 65

CNN:

Tammy Faye Messner, the former televangelist and Christian singer who battled drug addiction and later inoperable cancer, died Friday morning, CNN’s Larry King said Saturday night. He said the family had asked him to make the delayed announcement.

She was 65.

“She died peacefully,” King said.

Messner was a guest on “Larry King Live” on Thursday. She said she couldn’t swallow food, and weighed only 65 pounds. [...]

The Bakkers’ 30-year-old son, Jay, is a pastor who co-founded the Revolution Church in Brooklyn, New York—a church aimed at those who feel rejected by traditional approaches to Christianity, stating on the church’s Web site that he wrestled with religion after seeing the “excommunicative” treatment his parents experienced from the church after the scandal.

Tammy Faye Messner has also been known as one of the few evangelical Christians who had the support of the gay community. She was one of the first televangelists to reach out to those with AIDS when it was a little-known and much-feared disease. In return, she told King in July, “When I went—when we lost everything, it was the gay people that came to my rescue, and I will always love them for that.”

Google’s $4.6 billion bid for a swath of the airwaves

Google’s pushing for rules to aid wireless plans. Fred Wilson says, You Go Google:

Open devices, open services, open spectrum.

What would be really cool is if Google paid $4.6bn for the spectrum and then opened it up for the world to use as we see fit, just like Facebook opened up their platform.

It’s gonna happen. I can feel it.

Starry Starry Night in Second Life

Grayson says, “This is so beautiful, on so many levels. It’s little wonder then that Second Life means so much to so many. Bring your hankie.”

I agree.

Publishing 2.0 to newspapers: Stop publishing in print

Scott Karp says “blogs are now the organizing principle for newspapers’ original online content” and wonders if to fulfill the Fourth Estate mission in our digital media era maybe newspapers should become nothing more than local blog networks:

Maybe there are three tiers of journalists at these blog network “newspapers”:

1. Full-time reporters and editors, who ensure breadth of coverage, quality and standards, and public mission
2. Paid freelancers who write on a regular basis, but not full-time — these can be stay-at-home parents looking for supplemental income, retirees looking for extra income or to keep busy, college students, etc.
3. “Witness” reporters (avoiding “citizen journalist” on purpose), who contribute to the reporting effort when they witness news in some form

I like his formulation and have no doubt they should be; the question, rather, is how long until they will be?

Many newspapers are closer to this model than they may realize, but there a few radical steps required:

• Use more freelancers who can post to blogs part-time
  
• Create a platform for anyone to report news — but on the established blogs, not in some big sloshing vat of random submissions — if someone wants to contribute regularly, given them their own blog, a focus, and (just enough) structure

To really take advantage of the economies of this model, which could actually enable MORE local reporting, newspapers need to consider one final step — stop publishing in print.

Via Martin Stabe.

Romney and the bogus badges

I barely noticed the first report of Mitt Romney’s then director of communications, Jay Garrity, being investigated for impersonating a state trooper. This second time is too hard to pass up:

In an apparent violation of the law, a controversial aide to ex-Gov. Mitt Romney created phony law enforcement badges that he and other staffers used on the campaign trail to strong-arm reporters, avoid paying tolls and trick security guards into giving them immediate access to campaign venues, sources told the Herald.

The bogus badges were part of the bizarre security tactics allegedly employed by Jay Garrity, the director of operations for Romney who is under investigation for impersonating a law enforcement officer in two states. Garrity is on a leave of absence from the campaign while the probe is ongoing.

A campaign source said Garrity directed underlings on Romney’s presidential staff to use the badges at events nationwide to create an image of security and to ensure that the governor’s events went smoothly.

“They (the aides) knew the badges were fake and probably illegal,â€Â� said a presidential campaign source who asked for anonymity because the story could damage the individual’s career. “But they went along with it because Jay (Garrity) pushed it on them.”

Via Steve Benen:

How could the candidate not know?

I almost laughed at the carefully-worded statement from the Romney campaign:

“No one on the Mitt Romney for President campaign is authorized to use a badge, nor has the campaign provided anyone with a badge,” the statement reads. “Jay Garrity is not working on the campaign because he continues to be on a leave of absence.”

Well, of course civilians on the campaign aren’t “authorized” to use phony badges; it’s illegal. And of course the campaign wasn’t handing out phony badges to Romney staffers; that would be stupid.

Prince: The model of a modern stager General

Prince is offered up as one template for a pop star in our file-sharing era by the NYTimes:

Prince has remade himself as a 21st-century pop star. As recording companies bemoan a crumbling market, Prince is demonstrating that charisma and the willingness to go out and perform are still bankable. He doesn’t have to go multiplatinum - he’s multiplatform. [...]

Like most pop stars, he goes on major tours to coincide with album releases, which for Prince are frequent. But he also gets out and performs whenever he chooses. Last year he took over a club in Las Vegas and renamed it 3121, after his 2006 album “3121,” which briefly hit No. 1 and spawned multiple conflicting theories about the significance of the number. He started playing there twice a week for 900 people at $125 a ticket. In February he had an audience in the millions as the halftime entertainment for the Super Bowl. He has gone on to play well-publicized shows at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood for a few hundred people paying $3,121 per couple, and another elite show last weekend in East Hampton for about $3,000 per person.

Meanwhile Verizon put Prince in commercials that use “Guitar,” another song from “Planet Earth,” as bait for its V Cast Song ID service, making the song a free download to certain cellphones. On July 7 Prince introduced a perfume, 3121, by performing at Macy’s in Minneapolis.

In Britain he infuriated retailers by agreeing to have a newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, include the complete “Planet Earth” CD in copies on July 15. (The album is due for American release this Tuesday.) Presumably The Mail paid him something in the range of what he could have earned, much more slowly, through album sales. British fans have remunerated him in other ways. On Aug. 1 he starts a string of no fewer than 21 sold-out arena concerts, 20,000 seats each, at the O2 (formerly the Millennium Dome) in London at the relatively low ticket price of £31.21, about $64. The O2 ticket price also includes a copy of the album; Prince did the same thing with his tour for “Musicology” in 2004. Those “Musicology” albums were counted toward the pop charts, which then changed their rules; the “Planet Earth” albums will not be. But fans will have the record.

Prince’s priorities are obvious. The main one is getting his music to an audience, whether it’s purchased or not.

On Prince and the record labels:

Prince ended a two-decade contract with Warner Brothers Records in 1996 after a very public falling out with the label. During the mid-1990s he appeared with the word “Slave” painted on his face and said the label was holding back material he wanted to release. For a while he dropped the name Prince - which was under contract to Warner Brothers and Warner/Chappell Music - for an unpronounceable glyph; when the contracts ran out, he was Prince again. And since leaving Warner Brothers he has been independent. He owns his recordings himself, beginning with a three-CD set called “Emancipation” from 1996. He has released albums on his own NPG label and Web site or has licensed them, one by one, for distribution by major labels, presumably letting them compete for each title. Over the past decade he has had albums released through EMI, Arista, Universal and Sony.