I hang my hat at Tumblr
“It’s no surprise whatsoever that Chelsea Clinton didn’t electrify broadcast journalism with her debut Monday night on NBC’s “Rock Center With Brian Williams,” because she has no experience in broadcast journalism…Rather, what was surprising to see on Monday night’s show is how someone can be on TV in such a prominent way and, in her big moment, display so very little charisma — none at all. Either we’re spoiled by TV’s unlimited population of giant personalities or this woman is one of the most boring people of her era.
Which is well within her rights to be.
Except on television.”
The women come and go, talking of Team Coco
MTV’s 30th has prompted a lot of web chatter. My friend Marc Myers took a conversation we had recently and turned it into a sweet piece on the MTV logo on his wonderful JazzWax blog (a lot more detail from me for you detail freaks here). Thanks Marc!
MTV turned music inside out on this date 30 years ago. On August 1, 1981, the 24-hour music channel not only added a powerful visual component to rock but also helped usher in a third pop British Invasion that influenced virtually all forms of music and music videos in the 1980s. By extension, MTV created a new appetite for music sales. Before MTV, rock, pop and soul were radio and record affairs. For a visual look at your favorite artists, you had to turn to album covers and fan magazines. MTV forced stars to become larger than life personalities, dancers and actors.
Music videos for MTV may have killed the radio star but they also sparked an employment boom for video directors, choreographers, cameramen, tape editors, hair and makeup artists, costume designers, and graphic designers. When most people think of MTV in the ’80s, what comes to mind first is the channel’s cartoony logo and endless clever ways in which the letters M, T and V were displayed.
The person largely responsible for the logo was Fred Seibert [pictured in 1981], a creative director then and now a television and film producer who owns Frederator Studios in New York. Thirty years ago Fred had a vision for the network’s brand and inspired artist Frank Olinsky to solve the challenge. Today, on the anniversary of MTV’s start, I asked Fred to recall the story of the logo’s birth, a fabulous tale he told me over lunch recently.
(Get the rest of Marc’s piece here.)
At my MTV office, 1981. Photograph by Alan Goodman.
Such a great read, and an amazing picture of Fred….
I'm Pretty Sure a Deal to Accept Satan as their Lord and Master Is the Correct Answer Here
(Mediabistro, How Reelz Got Ten Emmy Nominations for The Kennedys)
In this week’s Newsweek, I write about Breaking Bad, which returns for its fourth season on July 17 and is, as I put it in the piece, “the best program on TV, period.”
To report the story, I traveled to Albuquerque, N.M. and hung out with Vince Gilligan, Bryan Cranston, and Aaron Paul as they finished shooting the last two episodes of the new season. (That’s Cranston waving to me above.) It was fascinating—this conversation in particular:
Bryan Cranston is freaking me out. The skinheaded actor and I are sitting on the cold, dark, 76,660-square-foot set of AMC’s Breaking Bad in Albuquerque and talking, between takes, about the larger themes of the show, which traces the moral decline of Cranston’s character, Walter White, a timid high-school chemistry teacher who discovers he has terminal lung cancer and decides to pay his family’s bills by cooking the finest crystal meth in New Mexico.
“Have you ever ‘seen red’?” he asks. I’m not sure where this is coming from. “I mean, have you ever gone insanely mad, to where you are incredibly dangerous?”
“Me?” I mumble. “No.”
Cranston nods and continues. “I did once, with a girlfriend who was nuts, a drug addict,” he says. “She was banging on my front door, and I was afraid to open it because she was a powerhouse kind of woman. I had to keep her out of my life. And I had this vision. In my mind, I opened the door—I was living in New York at the time—and I grabbed her by her hair, and I pulled her into my apartment. And on one wall of my apartment is real brick. A brick wall, 12 feet high. And I took her head, and I smashed it against the brick. Over and over and over again. Until I could see—I saw the blood splattering! I saw the brain matter! I saw…I envisioned that I killed her.”
For more sex, drugs, and violence, make sure to read the rest.
Done and done. Really nice.
And today’s blog debut de resistance: Doctor Who.
Well hello there, Jimmy Fallon…
“Where Olbermann starts to get carried away in his high dudgeon is in, essentially, blaming Koppel and his conception of proper TV news for the Iraq War. Before, during and after the war, he says, the press failed to question the evidence that going to war was based on; “when truth was needed, all we got was facts—mostly lies, anyway.”
Well, not exactly. The real, valid criticism would be that, amid all the embedding of reporters and flashy video, we had an lack of incontrovertible facts—in particular about Saddam’s WMDs or the lack thereof—and that absence of facts was not treated with appropriate skepticism. Or mostly it wasn’t; in fact, the very old-school Knight-Ridder Washington bureau was almost alone in questioning the evidence for war, hard, and in turning out to have been right.
In other words, the problem was neither partisanship nor a slavish devotion to “facts”; it was the willingness and ability to assess a field of incomplete information and take the risk of making an informed judgment based on it. The answer was not reporting, “This side says X and this side says Y, who do you believe?”; but it was also not just editorializing and reflexively saying that, if the Bush administration said it was day, then it must be night. (Although, admittedly, in this particular case, that would have gotten you closer to the correct answer on WMDs.)”
“Don Draper says ‘What.’”
Yeah, okay, this is amusing, but we also think it’s further evidence that “Mad Men” is stupid, Draper is a cipher, and Jon Hamm is a boring actor.
In which we learn Washpost Style is unafraid to alienate the entire Tumblr community
We told Conan we’d plug his blog if he mentioned Tumblr on camera.
He called our bluff.
This was actually really fun.
