Mark Romanek directs music videos. His website is a great example of the web providing supplementary and explanatory material to more traditional forms of media. His music videos are all online in quicktime and you can read original treatments and see on set photographs. Romanek directed the video for Jay-Z’s 99 Problems this year and the video for Johnny Cash covering NIN’s Hurt in 2003. These are both great videos, and they complement each other perfectly. They are both by quintessentially American artists who work in quintessentially American forms, but their music could not be more different. Both videos offer recapitulations of the artists path and the choices they have made. The video for Hurt suggests that Cash wouldn’t change a thing, while the video for 99 Problems suggests how easily things could have ended differently for Jay-Z. And they both illustrate what music videos can do best: provide an alternate narration for a song, expose meanings you hadn’t considered before, evoke new resonances.

This writing gig, this is my Neighborhood of Make-Believe, where it is easy to be bold and honest and confrontational. But in my real life, I have always been shy and wussy, and Mr. Rogers' gentle-Americana Buddhism made me feel as if that was good. He knew that the only reassurance in the face of the Sendakian horrors of childhood—the uncertainty, the lack of control—is acceptance. His neighborhood wasn't a utopia—he lived alone in a small apartment with a fish tank—but a community where every type of person was nice to him because he accepted them. I'd assuage my loneliness by jamming to my Mr. Rogers album all the time, but it wasn't until high school that I learned how politically radical Fred Rogers was. One of the toughest kids in the school, drunk, his gold chain hanging halfway down his already hairy chest, told me his dad would lock him and his brother in the closet every time he caught them watching Mr. Rogers, fearful the show would turn them into homosexuals. But even years later, at 18 years old and miles from a sweater vest, this kid still loved Mr. Rogers. And I realized how much worse my high school, and my world, would have been without him.

originally posted by xowie

I hear the word cheap a lot; I've heard cheesy. A lot of people are fussing about paint jobs that are not finished and about inferior carpentry.

The top result of a google image search on ‘p2p art’:

With the war rolling ahead on television, you the viewer are made a part of the invading army. Even the local meteorologists participate in the illusion. They give two weather reports: sunshine in New York, sandstorms in Basra.

Meanwhile, just as the audience feels a part of the army, the army becomes part of the audience. American troops on an aircraft carrier watch CNN to see how the war is playing and progressing. Soldiers are watching other soldiers on television.

That is, there is general confusion as to who is acting and who is watching. And at the crux of the confusion are the traditional eyewitnesses to war, the journalists, "embedded" with the troops. Are the television cameras the witnesses to war, or are they part of the weaponry? Or both?

I watched so much and from such an early age, in fact, that I didn't understand what TV was for. I say this to people and they think I'm kidding, but I didn't realize that 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' was supposed to be funny I thought you just watched it. The people said things, and they moved around, and you just waited till you saw the kid—you know, you liked to see Richie.

Mrs. Xowie is on TSG today (via Drudge Report).

originally posted by xowie

The official game show of randomWalks just taped a week of shows with rescue workers and firefighters. Take one bong hit every time Bullard says “Tami”.

originally posted by xowie

“Watch this transcendent one-hour comedy about high school kids trying to figure out where they fit in and you will experience the painful laughter of recognition. And you will fall in love with the show’s motley crew of nerds, stoners, brainiacs and confused souls and you will say, ‘How come nobody told me this was so awesome?'” Joyce Millman has been telling you since September. “Freaks and Geeks” is in desperate danger of being cancelled, but it’s on tonight at 8pm EST on NBC. If you’re concerned, you can help keep the show on the air.