Dana Blankenhorn

Black Camelot

It is almost certain that, in the next few years, Broadway will mount a re-staging of the Broadway musical Camelot, probably with an all-black cast.

This will happen regardless of the election results. If Obama wins, it's an echo of the Kennedy era. If he loses it's in keeping with the play's actual plot, which is that Camelot is destroyed.

How do I know? This is how Broadway rolls. They reprise musicals 50 years after their opening. Kiss Me Kate re-opened in 1999, The Pajama Game in 2005. Camelot, which first opened in 1960, is due.

That's sort of forgotten these days because, in its first run, Julie Andrews took it over. It was all about the singing. She was a marvelous singer. But at that time, she wasn't a great actress. She wasn't ready to play the villain.

That's what Guenevere is, the villain. And that's what she will be when the play is re-staged.

Why an all-black cast? Because, frankly, there are more really talented black folks ready to grab these parts right now than white ones. (Brian Stokes Mitchell doesn't count. He's played both Coalhouse Walker, a black man in Ragtime, as well as The Man of La Mancha and the lead in that Kiss Me Kate I mentioned earlier. If you want to re-do Flower Drum Song I'm sure he'd be great.)

Rather than concern ourselves with the details of the re-staging (what might be added, or dropped, what might the costumes look like, or the staging) it's far more fun to play that great Hollywood Game -- I wanted, I'd take, I got.

As in I wanted Laurence Olivier, I'd take Dick Van Dyke, I got Dom DeLuise. Only to make this game even more sporting, let's play it this way. Who plays the role on Broadway, who gets it in the Hollywood motion picture, and who goes about touring it in the sticks?

Self Delusion

Self delusion is a common human trait. Only by convincing ourselves that change is possible does change become possible.

Journalists are supposed to keep a check on this. We're taught in school, and at work, to play straight with all others, so we can play straight with our readers.

Yet we are human. We lie to ourselves all the time. And when we do it's up to others to call us on it.

One hallmark of this era, within journalism, has been a self delusion among its elite practitioners that they are somehow above the market, and above the fray, that they are impartial arbiters of what is happening around them.

This is a misreading of our role. We're not umpires. We are witnesses.

But thinking ourselves umpires gives us a feeling of power. It boosts our egos. This is a very dangerous way to live and work, but on TeeVee it's often encouraged, because TeeVee is a "hot" medium, excitement a form of acting, so puffing yourself up and preening is what makes you acceptable to the camera.

I got a nasty taste of this on MSNBC recently, during Keith Olbermann's Countdown. He was chatting with Jonathan Alter (left) about the constant right-wing refrain that "the press is biased." Both laughed, called it "working the refs," and agreed that it never works.

Bullshit.

(It's at around 5:10 in the video which follows)

McCain-Bloomberg?

It's hard not to feel bad for ol' John McCain, the way you feel bad for the Valkyries at the end of Gotterdammerung, or Ike Clanton at the end of Tombstone.

He's struggled all his life to get to this spot and finds himself a no-hoper, a joke, a punchline. Not Rocky, but one of those one-or-two-round palookas the champ thought Rocky was before the fight happened.

It's not all his fault. Had McCain been his party's nominee in 2000 he might have won. But he also would have been the prisoner of all those dark forces which swirled around Bush, and no more likely to have avoided his mistakes. Besides, he asked for it. He was taking a birthday cake from Bushie when New Orleans was drowning, and he was smiling.

So I should be kicking myself for suggesting this, but there may be a way for ol' John McCain to make this thing closer than it has any right to be.

The Media War

A hallmark of every generational crisis is a conflict between media, with one medium rising while another fights back.

A generation ago TV was the rising medium. Newspapers thought they were serious competitors in terms of political coverage. The decade began with Nixon's loss of the 1960 debate to Kennedy (radio listeners thought he won) and ended with Nixon triumphant, having learned TV stage management from Bob Haldeman.

We're now going through a similar period, only this time TV is on the defensive. And there are many ways in which that medium is fighting back against the Internet onslaught:

• Denial -- Howard Kurtz's new book Reality Show, and the accompanying interview tour, is a great example. He actually claims that people turned against the Iraq War because of the reporting by TV newscasts. Really.
• Advertising -- This is the method favored by incumbent industries, especially the telecom and oil oligarchs. Run a bunch of ads claiming "it's the network" (while seeking a monopoly on the Internet that will let the telecomms close off "selected" sites) or claiming that oil is green (only if it's made from people, Conoco) in such tight rotation that the TV news can't challenge you and people come to believe up is down, right left, and Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania.
• Strangulation -- Cable and telephone networks are deliberately strangling Internet bandwidth, defining "TV" and "voice" as separate services, which they're not, and charging out the wazoo for the few bits that are left. What will happen is people will pay until they realize the depth of the rip-off. And that will be the end of the cable and phone networks. The Internet itself will go blithely on.
• Goons -- From silly strategery to paid goons, corporations continue to treat blogs as something that can be managed and overcome. They can't. You have to deal with them, and accept their values, or you're the enemy.
• Competition -- This has been the most effective tack, turning journalists and columnists into bloggers. The New York Times kept Paul Krugman in a cage for two years, then suddenly unleashed him as a paid blogger. This makes some objective sense, since publishers know how to monetize pages in ways regular people can't (Blogads is dead), but some can make the transition and others can't.

Some thoughts follow

Has YouTube Cracked the Video Business Model Puzzle?

One thing has become clear since I began covering the business of the Internet in 1994. It's much harder to innovate business models than it is technology.

Many companies have figured this out and begun acquiring tech outfits even before they have a business model.

The most notorious such acquisition was Google's purchase of YouTube. And now, over a year later, they claim to have that business model problem licked.

The answer -- overlays. Clickable ads run on a portion of the screen, for a portion of the clip's run-time. The alternative, running ads before, during or after the clip, was rejected by Google because, it said, users wouldn't stand for it.

The Politics of Comstockery

American censorship, no matter its reasoning, is always political. It represents an effort by a dominant or growing Political Thesis to ride the other side out of the debate.

The Comstock Laws of 1873, the most successful censorship regime, were used by Republicans to banish reformist impulses under the Civil War Thesis that reached its peak under then-President Grant. (That's Anthony Comstock himself to the right, from Wikipedia.)

If you can't describe the sexual violence and degradation attendant to the rise of industrial New York, you can't possibly change it.

The great successes of the Progressive Movement, such as Jacob Riis' classic How the Other Half Lives, lay in describing this reality so it could be addressed. Forcing attention on what needed reforming required defying what had become the common concept of the law.

The Customer Is Always Right

There has been a bit of liberal triumphalism on the blogs lately. (This is a band which gets what I'm about to write.)

It has to do with copyright. Copyright is an issue that has united both Left and Right Blogistan since the Web was spun. All those who work on the Web recognize that the absolutist position of the copyright industries is self-defeating. The only way you succeed with a market, or an audience, is by identifying with its needs, ahead of your own.

In journalism this is called credibility. In music it's called keeping it real. In the real world of business it's called the customer is always right.

Yet for a decade now the copyright industries have been fighting what their market obviously desires, the unfettered access to content which the Internet provides. The copyright industries have changed the law, they have tinkered with technology, they have forced ads onto viewers, they have editorialized. None of it has worked.

In a free market consumers have the ultimate power. If we keep our hands in our pockets you don't make a sale. If we don't like the terms and conditions we are likely to keep our hands in our pockets. End of story.

Two liberal blogs, Eschaton and Down with Tyranny, are in an especially feisty move this morning. Atrios notes the fall of the newspaper industry.  Howie Klein notes the fall of the music business.  While these are both political blogs, doing a bit of political gloating, fact is both are covering a business story.

And that's my beat.

The great failure of the copyright industries in the last decade has been its inability to create  compelling business models for the Internet which bring the same revenue, per viewer, that they had before. This is largely because both were dealing with overly-large numbers.

It's not what the million-selling records or the hundreds of thousands of newspaper buyers think which is important. It's not the customers you have despite your attitude that is important. What is important is what each individual consumer believes, both those who are buying your product and those who are not.

What matters is whether you can make money with one consumer, not 1 million. Do the first and the second will follow. Nothing else matters.

It is possible that video will lead the way here. Because video is discrete, because it is expensive to produce, and because good video will always be in short supply, there is promise.

The battle is now on between networks and Internet companies to monetize video. If you go to Comedy Central's MotherLoad, for instance, you'll be forced to watch a liquor ad for each two segments of programming. (I like the mute button.) And Google is not the only Web company now seeking video circulation.  Netscape is in on it,  and at the heart of the recent NBC Universal deal is the idea that AOL and Microsoft will be getting in on it too.

What matters here are metrics:

• Cost to deliver each video.
• Cost to advertise each video online.
• Value you receive per viewer.

Talk Radio is Right Wing Rock

Some of our pieces in The 1967 Game make obvious sense, like comparing Mitt Romney to his father George.

This one may make less obvious sense. Just remember we're not talking about talent, but about political history, and the political impact of what its adherents call an art form.

Talk radio is right wing rock and roll.

Talk radio is actually older than rock was in 1967 (it was barely 12 then), but as any visitor to the Hall of Fame will tell you, rock music actually traces its lineage further back, as it was originally a fast Rhythm and Blues. And R&B dated from the 40s, 20 years from the date we're talking about.

Modern talk radio also dates back 20 years, to the 1987 end of the Fairness Doctrine. Destroying the premise of broadcast regulation allowed right-wing screamers to take the bark off, to ignore community standards and wail away. You might think of Rush Limbaugh, then, as being the Chuck Berry or Little Richard (left) of this new art form.

Talk radio reacted to the Clintons much as rock music reacted to the Eisenhower years. It developed in reaction. If it had an Elvis Moment, it was obviously the Lewinsky Scandal. Just as with rock in the mid-50s, the Lewinsky matter pushed talk radio to the forefront, legitimized it, and turned its players into true national figures. Here is where a host of new stars emerged, like G. Gordon Liddy and Ollie North, each with their own song of white male suffering. The Day the Music Died was the day Clinton was acquitted.

The key to the rise of both talk radio and rock music was a defined audience, one with enormous loyalty and a feeling of oppression in their daily lives. White middle class men, many of them in jobs that required lots of driving (thus lonely), did for talk radio precisely what lonely teenagers in their bedrooms did for rock music. They defined it, they set its tastes, and they created their stars in their own image. They followed its message and took it to heart. (Oh, so that's why Limbaugh is so ugly.)

Jobs-Envy

Despite the similarity in their ages (they're both born in 1955, same year as me) Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are men of different times.

Gates is of the 1980s, when computing was defined politically, through software. He became the anti-IBM candidate for the future of computing, then outmaneuvered IBM at the bottom of the stack, in the operating system, where it had made itself vulnerable.

Jobs is a man of today, when computing is defined in terms of marketing, where it has become a mere extension of consumer electronics. Image as defined by Hollywood, a focus on cool design and simple return policies, has always been his metier. You pay for that -- you've always paid more for Apples -- but the value proposition is always there.

So why all this Jobs-envy?

When people like Bill Thompson of the BBC (the picture is from his column) attack Jobs, they see  what isn't there rather than what is, saying Apple has "a tiny share of the computer market and an increasingly perilous first mover advantage selling portable music players," then complaining that we pay it too much attention.

Jobs-san

One name kept coming up in my head while watching Steve Jobs introduce his over-hyped, exquisitely timed iPhone.

Akio Morita.

Morita, the legendary Sony chairman, didn't do demos. But he was brilliant at taking parts and turning them into consumer electronics products that people would want. He would stay just slightly ahead of the demand curve, seldom getting ahead of himself. He was also an iconoclast, who insisted on going his own way and sometimes (as in Betamax) paid the price for it.

As much as anyone, Morita transformed Japan from a manufacturer of junk to a quality brand. He forced other companies to follow him, and some of the credit for their success should go to him.

Of course Morita made two key mistakes, which Jobs is also threatening to make: