Not knowing about Harry Potter makes you culturally irrelevant

You know who these people are and can give me some sort of fact about the movie they appear in, right? Good, because if not, I would be worried.

Wow, long time no blog! I guess I get too busy with other things. Since I have last blogged, I've still been reading a lot of Chuck Klosterman, specifically the book 'Chuck Klosterman IV' and his many Esquire articles online. Once again I think that man is brilliant and am driven to blog by his articles. Not about what he knows, this time. More about what he doesn't know. I'm also here to muse about how someone who loosely defines himself as a pop culture critic knows nothing whatsoever about one of the biggest defining cultural phenomenons of a generation.

In his article called "Death by Harry Potter", which appeared in Esquire in 2007, he admits to knowing nothing whatsoever about the famous boy wizard, or the books series that has enthralled millions. The first thing, I, a super Potter fan, though while reading this was "How the hell is that even possible?" I mean where does Klosterman live, under a rock? Has he never watched television? Does he not know someone who knows something Potter related? For someone who talks about being so culture oriented, how could he not have the faintest clue about Harry Potter?? He talks about ignoring the books and movies, but with all the press both have gotten, and all the hype surrounding them, I don't think you could ignore it so much that you haven't at least picked up bits and pieces. Even just paying attention to the news would get you the basic storyline.

I'm not saying everyone has to be as obsessive as me; knowing every single fact, reading the books and watching the movies multiple times, and even dressing up. Some people can even hate Harry Potter, and I know many who do (admitedly, not too many). Those people, however, have some basic knowledge of the story, and have never appeared as clueless as Chuck Klosterman in his article, even if they have never read a book or watched a movie. I just don't understand how someone who talks so much about other pop cultural phenomena can be ignorant of one that has in recent years become ubiquitous. In the world of popular culture, not knowing the bare necessities of Harry Potter is akin to not knowing that the music video for Michael Jackson's Thriller involved zombies.

What exactly is so wrong about this lack of knowledge? It was hard for me to separate my obsessive fan outrage with the actual possible reasons. One thing Chuck Klosterman admits is that it creates a generation gap between his generation and the one that I belong to, the one he says in the article will probably go on to control the mass media. I've noticed some of this generation gap in his writing already. He talks about some bands, shows, and celebrities that I am completely unfamiliar with sometimes. I am guessing they were most popular some time before I was born, most likely in the 1980s. He was, however, more relevant than other writers on similar topics, which is why I kind of like him. He does say that not knowing about Harry Potter may be detrimental to his career, which is likely. Pop culture is about right now and if you don't know about something so essential to the culture of the moment, that puts you at a major disadvantage.

Harry Potter is probably the biggest literary phenomenon of all time. That in and of itself deserves at least some notice. It's something that everyone, no matter what their age or interest, knows something about. For my generation (and I hope that makes no one older who happens to read this feel old), it is also something we've grown up with. I was 8 when the first book came out, and 17 when the last came out. I'm 19 now, and the 6th movie has just come out (it was awesome by the way!) I grew up as Harry did, and like watching Sailor Moon and liking the Spice Girls as a child, it is a common thread that connects me with any new person I meet who is around the same age as me. I don't think that Star Wars, which Klosterman uses as an example in his article, ever reached the same amount of popularity with all people of all ages all around the world.

There are certain things that stand the test of time in the world of popular culture. These are things that everyone knows about, no matter when they were born. These things stay popular even if they really haven't been for many years, at least not in their original way. I know about the Jackson 5, even though the height of their popularity was when my mother was a child. I know vaguely of the Mickey Mouse club, although I think it was cancelled long before I can remember. I know about and love Monty Python, and was shocked when my mother told me she watched it when she was my age. Harry Potter is most definitely one of those things. My grandmother's 70 year old friend knows about it, and so does the 4 year old I used to babysit. That to me shows it's pretty darn special.

I've heard that the media is ubiquitous. Well, as long as you don't live under a rock in the middle of nowhere with your eyes closed, so is Harry Potter.

Below is a link to the article, just in case anyone's interested.

http://www.esquire.com/features/chuck-klostermans-america/klosterman1107

News? What's that?

I haven't been updating this as much as I wanted, but I guess life gets in the way.

This post is to explore a question that has always been harder than necessary for me. Since I want to go into the news business, I figured it was important to know what was newsworthy. I read the paper practically everyday, but that doesn't help much. Things that I think shouldn't be important make the paper. Do I care about Jon and Kate's marriage crisis? Actually, following that has been a bit of a hobby of mine, but even I can tell that it is one issue that shouldn't be covered in a mainstream paper dedicated to "news". In my news gathering class, we learned that the two most important questions to ask to determine if something is newsworthy are 'So what?' and 'Who cares?' That works most of the time, but just because people care about something, doesn't make it important.

The mundane lives of celebrities have made the news for a long time because people think they care about that. (Though going deeper into celebrity news will require another post). There are also the sayings "When it bleeds, it leads", which means that the more gruesome and violent a story, the better it will be received. Happy news does tend to get left to brief mentions at the end. News also has to sometimes be sensational, something people wouldn't encounter in their daily lives often, which would make it most interesting. This is best captured in the quote by the former New York Sun editor John B. Bogart, "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news." There is also the fact that the news is a business that has to sell itself. Sometimes I think that what is newsworthy depends entirely on what will sell, which is a kind of depressing thought.

If that were the case, maybe a better question would be, What should be news? That might be an even harder question. Early on, everyone who wants to be a journalist is given a list of 9 'news values'. They're a good benchmark, but they are also not everything. Just because a story is a little weird, or involves a prominent person, or just happened, for example, doesn't make it news. I find that the best way to tell is a kind of a gut feeling. You look at something, and you just know. Or you think you know anyways. I try to go by things that I would want to know more about, or things that would make a good story. Then again, in class we learn how to make a good story out of the most mundane of things. I try to make it about what needs to be known, not necessarily what people want to know. Thinking of a newspaper or other news outlet as an aid to democracy is a good benchmark to determine what is worthy of the news.

So have I really answered the question? Possibly not. Here's a pretty good example that can be used to determine what you think news is. This is also taken from Chuck Klosterman's "Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs", not word for word since I don't have it on me, but the main idea.

Suppose you are the Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times. It is your job to decide what goes on the front page. This particular day, Scientists find and kill an authentic Bigfoot. By a strange coincidence, U.S. government captures the live Loch Ness Monster and are running experiments. On the very same day the president of the U.S. finds out he has inoperable brain cancer that will be fatal. What do you put on the front page?

This is a tough question. Even so, I hope to be in such a position some day, because that would be pretty cool. My first instinct is to not run the president story. Yeah, he's a pretty important guy, everyone knows that. On a day without all those other things, it would probably make the front page. However, all that story has is a famous person. Sadly, a lot of people get terminal cancer everyday, and that never makes the news. It will, of course, be in the paper somewhere. On a day like this, however, the event itself is too common, though the person it happened to is famous.

It's hard to pick one of the other two. There can, of course, be 2 things on the front page, but one will end up being the biggest. I think these two stories are similar enough to combine. They're both about two things previously thought not to exist that have had their existence proven. "Mythological Creatures Found" the headline will say (or something like that). It can go into how each of the creatures are found, and what conclusions can be drawn from finding them both on the same day. That story will make a very good issues of my paper. This is a far fetched scenario, but choices like this are made everyday. This or that? One will go on the front page, and one won't. Some things will be on the news, some won't. Happy things often fall into the "won't" category.

This entry hasn't solved anything, but what I hope to have done is to state that the question "What is news?" is one that has no definite answer, and must be answered day after day, story after story.

I Allegedly Keep Neglecting this Blog

Other summer projects have been getting in the way, really! But now I have something to say.

This quote, from "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs" struck me as extremely true:

"This is why all reporters eventually go insane: Even if you see a guy shoot someone - in fact, even if a guy shoots you in the face, and you watch the bullet come out of the chamber of the .38 he's holding - the event needs to be described as an "alleged" crime, and that alleged criminal needs to allege that he had no part in anything that allegedly happened." - Chuck Klosterman

I am definitely going to go crazy because of this some day.

Now I understand the need for such language, in principal anyways. Innocent until proven guilty and all that. Journalism is supposed to be about the facts, not who did or didn't do something. Yet it's really hard to say alleged when someone confesses, or when the event has a large number of witnesses. I start to wonder how much it is about the truth, and how much it is about how to avoid getting sued.

I had a lot of trouble with the legalities around reporting I learned in my News Gathering class, especially court reporting. In fact, all I know for sure is if I don't find a way to remember all that stuff fast, and I have to do a court story, I'm probably going to get sued. The excessive use of the word alleged seemed so unnecessary when for all it tries, reporting doesn't stick to the objective truth. Of course, you don't lie, that would be wrong . But out of pages and pages of notes that may be irrelevant, you need to exclude some things, and what you exclude depends on where you want the story to go.

There are also the observations we were told to make, and the leaving out of confessions and past criminal histories that I had a hard time grasping when it came to court reporting. We were told that we could report on how the person looked when they walked into court, their body language and their attire. Now what does that have to do with anything? Guilt or innocence? It just seemed to be a way of manipulating that precious "truth". And if someone confesses, do you still need to say allegedly? Sure they could be lying, or coerced, but they did say for a fact that they did the crime. Past criminal histories were another thing that I had a hard time leaving out. I mean, it happened, it's a matter of public record, and it was said in court. If it damages a persons case, that's because people can't separate past from present.

Klosterman also has trouble with the fact that journalists know for a fact that most people lie to them, and they must get both sides of a story however one sided a story may seem. It's perfectly all right to print something you know to be untrue, if of course, someone else said it. As long as it's properly attributed, it's fine. The same is to be said for stories where you know one side is right. As a journalist, you're not allowed to have an opinion. And while you may be pretty sure that a law protecting children from molesters is a good thing, you're going to need to find someone who thinks we should be nicer to the molesters, in order to present a fair and balanced story.

Don't get me wrong, I still want to be a journalist very much in spite of this small annoyance. There's too much about it that I love. I will allegedly get used to saying alleged seemingly unnecessarily. If it were a viable career option to be a professional blogger though, I'd totally do that.

Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs - Chapter 1

So I said I'd post once a week, but let's go with a maximum of one week between postings. I just got the book "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs - A Low Culture Manifesto" by Chuck Klosterman, and after finishing the first chapter I needed to post somewhat of a response.

The first chapter, This is Emo, was a long, cynical rant with liberal swearing about how love can never work. At first I thought, man, this guy is way too negative. Now I think man, this guy has a point. People are always saying they're in love with celebrities. In love with people they've never met. Well, Klosterman is right in saying that what people really love is the characters played by a particular actor or actress. Personally, I love Patrick Dempsey. At least, that's what I used to say. Now I realize that other that the fact that Patrick Dempsey is hot, I said I love him because I see him as doctor Derrek Sheppard, a.k.a McDreamy of Grey's Anatomy fame. I have never met him, but I doubt he is as kind, sensitive, and sacrificing for love as his character is. He probably doesn't really have much to do with Ellen Pompeo, his onscreen love interest. Crushes on celebrities are a normal part of life, unquestioned, and natural. But really, how normal is it to fall in love with a representation of a person seen only on a screen?

Movies and television, according to Klosterman, don't only warp who we love. They also warp what we expect of love. Media love always works out so perfectly in the end. The chapter talks about "When Harry Met Sally" situations, where best friends discover they've loved each other all along and they all live happily ever after. I'm sure it works sometimes. Sort of. But real life is generally a little more complicated. One person is usually the only one of the two with any romantic feelings. The other person has kept it at friends so long for a reason. Or else that person has never even considered romance there because it isn't really there for them. A lot of the times, hoping for a "When Harry Met Sally" situation is just a whole lot of false hope.

I'd love a turbulent road ending in true love like Ross and Rachel. I'd love it that everything would almost inexplicably work out perfectly no matter what mistakes were made, like Bridget Jones. I'd love true love that can transcend everything like that shared by the characters in the musical Rent. That would be so great, that it took a book like this to remind me that none of those stories are real. They are fictional stories that never really happened. Yet people base their whole love lives on these fictional stories, suffering crushing disappointment when the real world doesn't match up. Sometimes there doesn't need to be life changing conversation every second. As Chuck Klosterman says, there's nothing wrong with silence because you don't have to always say something. Look for meaning in words, because silence usually doesn't really MEAN anything.

Now this chapter hasn't made me give up on love all together. It just made me realize that's it's silly to expect the kind of as seen on TV love that everyone thinks is the way things really are. If I were always to expect something Ross and Rachel - esque, I don't think I'd recognize something much more real and much more magical.

Mourning Dove

While I appeared to have abandonned this blog, I have just been doing other school things. Now that it's summer, and I have a simple job, I'm going to attempt to update this blog with things I'm thinking at least once a week.

So on Sunday I went to see the play Mourning Dove since I had free tickets. It is a play based on the Latimer case, in which a man killed his severly disabled daughter because he said he wanted to stop her suffering. Before I actually this play I felt that the man deserved to go to jail. A life is a life, and you should go to jail for taking one away.

This play changed my perspective completely, and I think that's a testament to the great acting. You could see that the mother and father loved the child very much. They did everything they could do to make her laugh and smile. Yet every day they had to endure her suffering with seizures, and constantly gasping for breath. There was nothing they could do. She was going to have more surgery to cut off her thigh bone. Even that wouldn't alleviate her pain. If I were in a state like that, I would prefer death, because that's no way to live.

So the father should have killed her right? It's not that simple. They had no way to KNOW what she wanted, since she couldn't speak. Who knows whether she wanted to live that way or not, she certainly couldn't have been given her consent. No one knows what it was like to be her, since she was never able to tell them. Yet the impulse when a child is so obviously in pain to have that child drift off peacefully into sleep and never wake up, yet never be in pain again is extremely understandable. When you see him in the play wishing to be able to fix his daughter's pain and knowing he can't, my heart broke for him, because he did what he thought was the only thing he can do.

The other character Keith (I believe that was his name) complicated the question a bit. Keith was a man with developmental disabilities that was a friend of the family though I couldn't quite understand his relation. Keith was a kind man who didn't quite understand what was going on all the time, but just wanted to make Tina (the girl killed by her father in the play) and the rest of the family happy. When Keith found out that Tina's father killed her, he couldn't understand when the father said it was to kill her. As he said, killing doesn't help, it hurts. He felt that the father, Doug, killed Tina because she was different and would never heal. He says that as he is also different, called a freak, and will never heal, Doug should kill him too and stop his pain.

While I do not believe this man killed his daughter because she was disabled, and only because he believed her to be in unbearable incurable pain, this raises a whole new set of issues. If euthanasia is legalized to allow killing in compassionate circumstances, who is to decide what is compassionate? Who is to decide what is severly disabled? Do we just kill people because we believe they would be better off dead? It leads to a slippery slope which leads to leniency in cases like this to be thoroughly questioned.

This play touched me greatly, and had more than a few of the audience in tears. The small intimate theater added to that effect. Last year in my Plays of the Modern Era class, we saw several plays at this theater, all of which were deep, profound, and entertaining. If anyone who happens to read this wants to see a good play, I recommend seeing any play that is shown at Tarragon Theater, you definately won't regret it.

Thus concludes my blog, anyone who's interested can attempt to find a copy of Mourning Dove, or listen to it (it was originally a radio play). It is my summer goal to blog once a week, but we'll see how it goes.

If you would like to read my poetry I intend to write every day, go to my other blog ideasinarhyme.blogspot.com

Toothpaste for dinner

I've been thinking a lot about the fact that most of what we learn about media, or anything at all, comes from the Media itself. In class yesterday we talked again about Rupert Murdoch and the vast amounts of media outlets that he owns. The question came up, why does one need to own exactly that much? The first thing I came up with was power and control. Rupert Murdoch can use what he controls to make people think what he wants them to think about whatever he wants, and that's both pretty cool and pretty scary. Real post on this muuuuuuuuuch later (who knew school work takes up so much time?), but for now, look at the above cartoon from the awsomely cool website toothpastefordinner.com that kind of sums up what I was thinking of, and hopefully gives you something to think about too. If you can't read what the newspaper says, it says "Mass Media not Harmful: 'Read more newspapers', scientists said Monday". Very interesting newspaper headline, I think.

Lawrence Lessig on The Colbert Report

Well, I actually thought I'd never update this blog again, but here I am with something to say. Not as academic or thought provoking as my other entires, since my brain isn't used to thinking like it used to after that long break.

So a few days ago, I was watching the Colbert Report like I do many mornings. And who should the guest be but that guy who wrote that book I had to read for class. You know the one, Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I paid a little more attention, because I actually wanted to know what he had to say.

He was talking about his new book, Remix, which has the same theme as most of his work, copyright laws, and how they're outdated. He told Stephan Colbert that his show was like taking other peoples' work, and remixing it to create his own. He also talked about how that's exactly what young people like to do , and he's right, I love doing that. As with how it usually works on the Colbert Report, Lawrence Lessig was interupted several times, but I believe he made his point pretty well.

One thing that stuck with me was how he said that copyright laws are making kids into criminals, and yet they still don't work. He talked about the war against illegal downloading that has been "fought" for such a long time, and yet everybody still does it. Of course, Stephan had to be his hillarious self and remark that Lessig was saying because of illegal downloading, 9/10 kids are now in jail.

Generally things like that leave the guests flabbergasted, but Lessig just remarked that it is a kind of a jail, because there are laws that trap them into not being able to be creative without breaking the law. Stephan Colbert then got into the topic of remixing (taking someone else's work and using parts of it to make your own). Stephan Colbert took Lessig's book and said that if he were to write his own name on the book and add some Mickey Mouse ears, it would now be his own work, and Lessig should let him do it. Of course Lessig said that was great, since that is after all the whole point of his book.

Stephan Colbert continued to see that he is not like Lawrence Lessig, and no one can ever ever remix anything of his. While this was an extremely funny segment, it couldn't have been done in a more appropriate venue. So why this long recap? Well, if I didn't just spend way too much money on tuition and school books, I'd want to buy Remix, and see what else Lawrence Lessig had to say. And if anyone who happens to read this isn't as monetarily challenged as I am right now, they should look into reading it.

P.S. If anyone wanted to remix anything in this blog, go for it. I like what I write to be enjoyed and possibly inspire other creativity.