Designated Survivor 1.4: "Michigan's on the Verge of Anarchy"

That's what President Kirkman says in Designated Survivor 1.4 - "Michigan's on the verge of anarchy" - and with that woman at the Pence rally yesterday calling for revolution if Trump doesn't win, does this powerful drama have relevance to what's actually going on in our country today, or what?

But it's a drama, not reality, so Kirkman and the fictional America in which he's Presidents face far worse problems, including a second resurrection, on the part of his trigger-happy General.

Kirkman, expertly played by Kiefer Sutherland, defuses both situations. He fires the general, and lures the errant, fascist Michigan Governor to Washington, where Kirkman arrests him.  Very satisfying.

The whole series is excellent, my favorite of so far of the new television season.   It has the fast pace, surprises, and fast change of characters of 24.   Indeed, I realized tonight that Designated Survivor takes place after an episode of 24 which never existed, in which Jack Bauer somehow just can't stop the terrorist catastrophe.   Designated Survivor has all the political intrigue and innuendo of 24, but taking place after the U. S. government is all but destroyed.  And yeah, who better than the man who played Jack to play the new President.

In our reality, 24 was set to debut when 9/11 intervened.   It was delayed, and its ending was retooled to make it more in jagged accord with our post 9/11 reality.  Jack's wife didn't survive that last episode of that kick-in-the-stomach first season of 24.

There was always a sense that all bets were off with 24, and the same raw narrative energy courses through Designed Survivor.  It won't be on next Wednesday, because of the third Presidential debate, but who knows if that will take place, and I'm looking forward to Designated Survivor returning in any case.

See also Designated Survivor: Jack Bauer Back in the White House ... Designated Survivor 1.2: Unflinching and Excellent


  terrorist squirrels and bombs in NYC

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WikiLeaks As A Threat to Democracy

The current release via WikiLeaks of private emails from John Podesta, Chair of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, occasions another look at the difference between what Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden did - which I supported and applauded - and what Wikileaks is doing now, which I strongly oppose and condemn.

Here's why -

Ellsberg and Snowden are Americans, who released classified information about what our government was doing, information which both men had legal access to.   They of course violated the law, and the terms of their employment, by releasing this information, and we can debate whether these violations were warranted by the benefits of the releases to America and by extension the world. In my view, and the view of many others, Ellsberg strengthened our democracy by his actions, by showing the deception on which our instigation of the Vietnam War was based.  The benefits of Snowden's release of classified information are less clear, but I'd argue that they still fall on the side of benefitting our democracy, by providing inside information on how we conduct our foreign policy.

But note that in neither case was a break-in involved into someone's private property.  Both men had legal access to the information they released.  In contrast, the Podesta emails were obtained through hacking, or theft of Podesta's private property.  That makes the current Wikileaks release more akin to Nixon's Watergate break-in, than to what Ellsberg did with the Pentagon Papers.

Indeed, just as Watergate was intended to influence the Presidential election of 1972 - get Nixon re-elected - that's exactly what the Wikileaks release is now trying to do with our 2016 election.   The release of this information does not provide Americans with information about how our government operates, but rather about how people running campaigns talk about the campaigns.   I think Americans are entitled to know about how our government operates, in whatever ways that information is obtained.   In contrast, it's certainly interesting to see the inner workings of campaigns, but not via the mechanism of criminally hacking, and not when the hacking is designed not just to inform, but to damage a particular candidate.

And I haven't even addressed the likelihood - near certainty, actually - that the Russians were the ones who did the hacking.  If that's the case, then we have an aggressive foreign power attempting to tip the scales of our Presidential election.

But Wikileaks, whether the Russians are behind this or not, has moved from being a force for democracy to a danger to its existence, via their attempt to tamper with our election.

See also The Downfall of Julian Assange

Timeless 1.2: Small Change, Big Payoffs

Time-travel stories in which infamous events of the past are the targets of change - such as assassinations that the time-travelers don't want to happen - have an especially tough row to hoe.   If the event is indeed changed, what will the new future world be, and how will the time-travelers fit back into it.   If the event is not changed, how can the story avoid an ending of futile frustration?

Timeless has so far come up with a pretty good solution.  Bad events as we know them - last week the Hindenburg disaster, tonight the Lincoln assassination - are just slightly changed.   They're not stopped, but the surrounding circumstances of the event are slightly changed - because, in both cases, so far, the time-travelers are in action on the scene.

The result is that the world in the future - our world, as we know it - stays the same as far as major events.  But little parts of it change, specifically the family and now the love-life of one of our major characters, Lucy.  At least, so far.

Fortunately for Lucy, we the audience, and the narrative, there's a character at time-travel central who's able to map out for Lucy exactly why the little changes in the past led to the big changes in her life.   This gives Lucy and us a better idea of what's going on.

But still unclear is the villain's agenda, and why he - Flynn - is so bent on making catastrophes of the past even worse.   I suspect, am hoping, that the reason has some personal connection to Lucy, known or unknown by Flynn, because that will an add even bigger dollop of tension to the contrary forces that are pushing her to change history, presumably for the better, but with who knows what effect on her personal life, and leaving the past as it was and she knows it and her life in the future to be.

A nice kettle of fast-moving, subtly visible fish in which to situate time-travel stories.

See also Timeless 1.1: Threading the Needle


                       more time travel

Hillary Clinton, Erving Goffman, and Josh Meyrowitz

Hillary Clinton has been receiving much criticism from Donald Trump and know-nothing Republicans about her statement, released in a recent round of Wikileaks, that she says different things, takes different positions, in her public and private remarks.

I say "know nothing" quite deliberately, because anyone who has any knowledge of sociology would know about Erving Goffman's Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, published way back in 1959, and its revelation that all human beings have public and private personas, which often are in disagreement with one another.  A waiter smiles at a difficult diner, takes the order, then curses him out when he places the order with the cook behind the counter.  This is human nature - and, in the case of the waiter and everyone else, it doesn't prevent the waiter from doing his job, or even get in the way of that.  To the contrary, it enables the waiter to be professional in his public sphere and do a better job.

In 1985, my friend and fellow Media Ecology New York University PhD graduate Josh Meyrowitz applied Goffman's analysis to politics in No Sense of Place, and demonstrated how front and back regions are the lifeblood of all successful politicians and leaders.   Again, human beings require the private space to think out and explicate their positions to themselves and their families and closest advisors, before bringing them out to the public.

This is what Hillary was referring to when she cited Lincoln's differing public and private positions when he was working to get the 13th Amendment and its abolition of slavery through  Congress. We already know that Hillary was familiar with media theorist Marshall McLuhan - see Gail Sheehy's 1999 Hillary's Choice and my own McLuhan in an Age of Social Media - and the timing would certainly have been right for her to have encountered Goffman's book in her Wellesley classes.

As in every other issue in this campaign, we have a choice between a knowledgable, serious thinker in Hillary Clinton verses an ignorant, lying bully in Donald Trump.

Westworld 1.2: Who Is the Man in Black?

As the second Presidential debate played out across lots of television tonight, the second episode of Westworld proceeded on HB0.   Actually, it's been available On Demand for about a week - as our own world becomes ever more like Westworld in our ability to control our fiction - but I just saw it in the past hour.

And it was an excellent hour, which furthered and honed a question which arose in the first episode last week: who is the Man in Black?

Only guests are supposed to survive deadly attacks from the android hosts, and the Man in Black is able to dish it out - kill posses and other congregations of bad guys, not to mention innocents who serve his goals - but he seems invulnerable to any shots that come his way, i.e., go right into him.   So that would make him a guest, right?

But he seems to be something more, or maybe other than a guest, would be a better description.  He's being watched by the technicians in Westworld, and they usually seem to focus more on the hosts than the guests.   And he talks about how long he's been pursuing his goals in Westworld, which raises the question, if he's a guest, can a guest stay in Westworld for decades like the Man in Black?

So to the extent that all of that throws a little doubt on whether he's guest, that shifts the pendulum back to his being a host, albeit a special kind of host who's invincible to other host bullets, and we're left with a choice of the Man in Black being either an unconventional host (invulnerable) or an unconventional guest (can stay in the amusement park for decades).

I've seen some wild theories batted about online about the Man in Black's identity (well played, by the way, by Ed Harris).   My favorite is that he's really the Gunslinger from the 1973 movie, played by Yule Brenner.   There is a resemblance, but that would mean he's been in the park, well ... do we know if there's any connection between the movie and the TV series, which could tell us if the series is taking place x number of years after the story in the movie?

Nah, I don't think the movie and TV series are connected in that way.  But even so, Westworld the series is continuing to raise provocative questions, and well on its way to being another winner for HBO.

See also Westworld 1.1: Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick Served Up by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and J. J. Abrams



  

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Trump Does Better in Second Debate than in First, But Hillary Was More Presidential

Donald Trump did better in his second debate with Hillary Clinton than his first - a very low bar - but Clinton commanded the stage with her calm and rationality, and was more Presidential.

And you if look more carefully at the debate, it turns out Trump lied repeatedly - again.  He indeed voiced support for our Iraq War at the time, but repeated tonight that he did not.  He made the wild claim that our slain ambassador in Libya appealed for help "600 times" before he died.  He said Hillary Clinton was responsible for Obama not respecting the "red line" he drew in Syria, when in fact although Clinton was Secretary of State when Obama drew it, Kerry was Secretary of State when Obama did not enforce it. Trump and the truth continue to have the most fleeting of relationships.

And he was over the top lots of times, as when he said, incredibly, that he would put Hillary in jail if he were President - a statement that has been aptly decried by many as "banana republic" (no offense to the clothing chain).

Trump showed some style only once, at the end, when he said, in response to naming one thing he admired about Hillary Clinton, that she was a fighter.  She showed class, too, in her answer - that she admired the job he had done with his kids - and throughout her generally positive debate tonight, with fewer attacks on Trump than he rightly deserved.

Also worthy of praise were Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz, who easily were the best debate moderators so far, in this very contentious presidential season.

Look, I would've like to have seen Hillary Clinton lacerate Trump on the stage tonight, but I'm more than content to wait for election night in November for that to happen, and Hillary did a good job in making that more likely tonight.

Frequency (TV) 1.1: Closely Spun Gem

We live in an age in which time-travel is on all kinds of television in all kinds of ways - 11.23.63 from the Stephen King novel on Hulu, 12 Monkeys from the 1995 movie on the Syfy Channel, Outlander from the best-selling book series now a Starz television series,  a brand new time travel series Timeless on NBC, and now another TV series, Frequency, made from the 2000 movie, on the CW.

Can all of these series be good?  Well, you're asking the wrong person.  I'm inclined to really like anything with time travel - short story, novel, movie, TV series.  Hey, over half the stories and novels I've written are time-travel tales.

Still, I have some standards.   Frequency was a gem of a movie.  The simplest kind of time travel - information, in the form of a ham radio connection, bridging the past and the future, or the future and the past, depending on which way you looked at it, set in a gritty NYC cop story, and featuring the love between father and son.  But nothing is ever even remotely simple when time travel is afoot, and Frequency did a great job of navigating the paradoxes of changing the past and building them - or expertly juggling them - into an memorable story.   In fact, the movie is so good that I rank it among the top 10 or even 5 best time-travel movies ever made.

This is what the new television series is up against.  And, you know what?  I just watched the first episode and think it succeeds admirably.  Like the movie, the TV series is a closely spun gem.   A family is a stake - this time a father and daughter - not the world, and their struggle to change the past to avoid personal calamity without triggering new calamity promises to be ever bit as riveting and tender and just plain appealing as the movie.

I'll be here with reviews every week.

The Most Traditional of Traditional Media Lead in 2016 Presidential Campaign Reporting

The New York Times publication of Donald Trump's 1995 tax return a few days ago underlines the heroic work that the most traditional of traditional media - the paper press, and its reflection online - has been doing in the U. S. 2016 Presidential campaign.

The actual tax returns were of course dropped off in a reporter's mailbox at the Times, so it didn't take much work to retrieve them.  But it took acumen and shoe leather to track down the retired accountant in Florida who prepared the tax returns, and confirm that they were the real thing.  Even the excellent New York Daily News tabloid couldn't do that - the returns were left in their mailbox, too, but they lacked the depth and reach of a classic full-throttle newspaper like The New York Times and its reporting team of David Barstow, Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, and Megan Twohey.

Over at Newsweek, one of the two historical titans (with Time magazine) of news magazines, Kurt Eichenwald has published top-notch investigative reporting on Trump's overseas business entanglements and his dealings with Cuba in violation of the US embargo.   These stories were so important that Rachel Maddow at MSNBC previewed each of them on her show the night before their publication in Newsweek, providing a rare occasion in which the traditional paper press not Twitter served as the primary source of a cable news hour.

Meanwhile, David Fahrenthold at the Washington Post has been publishing stories for months that expose the truth of the Trump "charitable" Foundation, and the way it has been used in unethical and illegal ways to suit and further Trump's interests.    A course could be offered at any university about investigative reporting based just on Fahrenthold's relentless pursuit of this story.

I've been saying for years now that traditional print media have had their day, and certainly are not now what they once were.  Newsweek even paused its print edition for a little over a year, and the readership of The New York Times and the Washington Post has plummeted since their heydays.  But after the reporting they've provided in the past months, I'll make no mistake about it:  even in their diminished form, traditional print journalism has been providing unique and extraordinary service to our democracy.

Timeless 1.1: Threading the Needle

Hey, it's not easy to do time-travel, even pretty well, without being trite, too easy, on the one hand, or original and true to the intensity of paradox to the point of incomprehensibility, on the other.  If your characters are traveling to the past, do you allow them to change it?  If so, with what consequences for the present - what consequences that allow the travelers to go to the past in the first place, to change what their change of history has now already changed?  And, if nothing changes, or not much, you better make the story of how this happened still riveting enough to make it worth the viewing or the read.

Timeless, which debuted on NBC on tonight, threaded this needle pretty well.  The only arbitrary aspect of the set-up to make it all work, and keep the characters on track, was the stipulation that you can't travel back into a time in which you're alive, lest you run into yourself and cause all kinds of havoc in the time-space fabric.  This is a standard ploy - I've used it in some of my own stories - and I think every story is allowed at least one arbitrary convention, as long as the rest works on the tightrope.

The first episode features our characters trying to do something about the Hindenburg disaster, presumably to stop it from exploding after its transAtlantic journey in New Jersey, in 1937.  In a well-spun story that keeps you sufficiently off-kilter, something does stop the explosion - another time-traveler bent on doing far more damage to America in history by blowing up the Hindenburg on its return voyage to Germany, and with it some people to America's upcoming Second World War effort.

The good guys - actually three, an agent, a scientist, and an historian (Lucy, played by Abigail Spencer, who was so good in Rectify) - do manage to save the important people on the return voyage, but not the Hindenburg, which explodes anyway, for other reasons.  A nice bow to the resilience of history to change.

There's personal loss as a result of the time travel, especially vexing to our heroes, since, again they can't travel back to a time in their own lifetimes. This rolls an excellent counterpoint to our central stories - stopping this or that major calamity, or maybe making sure it happens - the deeper personal goal of bringing back what was lost, either as a result of the time travel or for other reasons.

So we have the makings of a good series here, and I'm looking forward to more.   There are some paradoxes that are not addressed or explained away by standard moves - such as the time travelers having recollections of what they changed (hey, that's a second arbitrary construct) - but it's impossible to do time travel without them, and at least they're mentioned or otherwise indicated in Timeless, rather than ignored.

Four Rudy Giuliani's on Twitter

I saw this earlier today on Meet the Press, and meant to write about it.

Rudy Giuliani is being interviewed by Chuck Todd, who cites a tweet from Giuliani.

Giuliani says that tweet wasn't by me - that there are four accounts impersonating him on Twitter. Todd says ok, drops the question, and moves on to something else.

What's going on?

Well, if you look for Giuliani on Twitter, you'll indeed find four accounts - actually, more than four - none of which have the coveted blue check mark, which indicates that the account was verified in some arcane way by Twitter.  Donald Trump's account has the check - and that's how we know that @realDonaldTrump  is really Donald Trump and @realDoneldTrump  is not.

I'm too lazy to paste the four bogus Giuliani accounts here - you can easily find them yourself - but, since indeed none have verifying check marks, I'll buy that none are really Giuliani.  But this begs the question of: why doesn't Giuliani get his own, real verified account?

Chuck Todd, as he often does, failed to follow up when Giuliani denounced the tweet as not his.   So we're left guessing why Giuliani doesn't have a check mark.   Is he on Twitter by some other name? Did Twitter not deign to give Giuliani a check mark?  (Hey, it happens - I don't have check mark on my @PaulLev account either.)

But whatever the reason, the result led to a signal moment in television news today, when the flagship Sunday news show of them all - Meet the Press debuted on NBC in 1947 - had to withdraw a question to a guest because it was about a tweet that in fact the guest didn't make, even though there are four accounts on Twitter tweeting under the guest's name.

More evidence for what I've said in McLuhan in an Age of Social Media about Twitter having toppled television as the cutting edge medium for delivery of news, and everyone other than the people on television knowing this.

Westworld 1.1: Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick Served Up by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy and J. J. Abrams

If you're talking about AI science fiction - robots or androids programmed to convincingly think and act like humans, or almost like humans, or more than humans - you've got to start with Isaac Asimov and his three laws of robotics:  (1) a robot can never harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow injury to befall a human, (2) a robot must follow all orders given to it by a human, except if such orders conflict with the first law, and (3) a robot should always act to preserve its own existence, except when following this third law would conflict with the first two.  Thus, a robot ordered by a human to dismantle itself must follow that order, unless the robot knows that the human giving such as order was set to commit suicide, a suicide which the robot not dismantled could prevent.  (This is not an exact quotation of Asimov's presentation of the three laws, but my own statement of them, with explanatory example.)

Now, Asimov was a fiction writer, a story teller, and one of the best all-time writers at that.  So, the only reason why he formulated the three laws was to provide the foundation of an exciting story in which, for some reason, the laws were broken.  A human is found murdered in a locked room, with a robot standing by, with blood on its arm, which indicates that the arm bludgeoned the human.  What happened?

Asimov didn't deal that much with the tricky nature of consciousness and sentience, but Philip K. Dick did, in a series of short stories and novels that stretched to the limits our understanding of how we understand sentience, and often put those stories in the brains of androids, as in Blade Runner.   Indeed, more movies and television shows have been made from Philip K. Dick's work than any other author, and most of them have been superb and pathbreaking.

So, when I say that Westworld, based on its first episode, is a combination of Asimov and Dick, served up by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and J. J. Abrams, that's high praise indeed.

The HBO series goes so far beyond the 1973 movie, which was very enjoyable but much less sophisticated, that the new series could have been titled differently and that would have been fine. The androids in the Westworld and related amusement parks begin to malfunction in the movie, killing the guests, but the emphasis is on the action, rather than the metaphysics of the androids.   In the HBO show, this ratio is reversed, and the first episode sets up all kinds of reasons for what may be happening - androids who want to break out of their dream, i.e., programming.

Among the most interesting is the possibility that repeated "builds" or programming sets may be leaking into one another, with the result that the oldest androids might be experiencing an unintended synergistic mixing of programming with unforeseen consequences.   And, to be clear, by oldest I don't mean the androids that look oldest, but the androids that are oldest, as in  having been created first.  In other words, in the series, beauty's only skin deep in all kinds of ways - or maybe it isn't only skin deep in more ways than we can or can't imagine.

I'm not going to review the action all that much in this series.  But I'll be here with metaphysic disquisitions whenever I can.


  

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Designated Survivor 1.2: Unflinching and Excellent

A powerful episode 1.2 of Designated Survivor with the past Wednesday, with jolting references to what's going on in our own reality off-screen, and President Kirkman even saying "dammit!" in Jack Bauer voice at one point.

But, look, I'm going to stop making snide references to 24, because, as great as that series was, Designated Survivor is its own show, and so far a very good one, deserving assessment in its own right.

Given the world in which we live, you don't have to look far to find something on our news which mirrors through cracked glass what we're seeing in Designated Survivor.  The train crash in Hoboken this week is apparently not the work of terrorism, but the mangled station and train brought forth all the feelings we still carry with us about 9/11.

Kirkman going down to site of the attack in Washington, the ruins of the Capitol building, taking the bullhorn, making like George W. Bush at Ground Zero after September 11, was very well done.  The whole backdrop of the destroyed Capitol is one of the most effective, haunting scenes I've ever seen on television.  It kicks you in the gut every time you see it.

The attack on innocent Muslims in Michigan, ordered by its Republican governor, also kicks you in the gut, and is obviously but convincing a reference to what could happen in our country if Donald Trump and his ilk get into power.   Kudos for Designated Survivor for not flinching away from this issue.

We still don't know who set the bombs, but the likelihood that an un-exploded bomb was deliberately left there to point investigators in the wrong - Islamic - direction continues to percolate, and supports the sense I had in the first episode that the perpetrators are domestic.  Designated Survivor is now much-watch television for me, and I'm looking forward to more next Wednesday.

See also Designated Survivor: Jack Bauer Back in the White House


  terrorist squirrels and bombs in NYC

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Why It's Hoboken Terminal not Hoboken Station

Amidst all the concern about the train crash in Hoboken Terminal today, and relief that only one life was taken, and thoughts for that family and the people and families of those who were injured, the question arose of why the train was said to have crashed into Hoboken Terminal not Hoboken Station.

Well, that's what the Hoboken train structure is called, and the reason is that when it was first constructed a century ago it was a terminus, literally the end of the line, a place were trains completed their runs, and went no further, except to turn around and go back the way they came.  In such a Victorian and Edwardian world, it made sense to call these facilities terminals rather than stations, where in contrast to terminals the train stopped but continued its journey in the same direction.

Grand Central Terminal is named terminal for the same historical reasons, even though it is often called Grand Central Station, which itself has become a metaphor for bustling with activity.   But train buffs know it should be Grand Central Terminal, and bristle when it's called otherwise. I was once sternly told by an assistant editor that I needed to change Grand Central Station to Grand Central Terminal in one of my novels. I complied and learned.

Of course, neither Grand Central nor Hoboken are true terminals these days, and have not been for years.   When you're on the New York City Subway system and your train pulls into Grand Central, you'll pulling into a station not a terminal, and your train doesn't turn around but instead continues on its way.  Same for the PATH trains in Hoboken.

But it's still charming and quaint to continue to call these places terminals, and I'm all for it.   Yet ... names and physical structures are not the same, and though we can enjoy the old-fashioned name, we want our equipment and  to be as new and crisply functional as possible.

As engineers look for the cause of the crash, and our thoughts continue for the full recovery of the survivors, we should also give a thought to improving the infrastructure of the rail system in this country.  We deserve better tracks and trains to take in and out of these "terminals".

Masters of Sex 4.3: Hugh Hefner and Sammy Davis, Jr.

Masters of Sex is back in good form in its 4th season, with an episode - 4.3 - that featured not only Hugh Hefner but Sammy Davis, Jr. in the intro.

Hugh Hefner and the scenes at his mansion have been the best parts of this new season so far.  First, the guy who plays him - John Gleeson Connolly - looks and sounds almost 100% like the Hef we remember.   But his role in this Masters of Sex story is great, encouraging Masters and Johnson to be a couple.   At this point, the coupling is professional.   But Hef and we know that there is much more in store - not to mention what we've seen with our own eyes in previous seasons - and Hugh Hefner is therefore playing the role of the matchmaker, the guardian angel, of what we and history know to be right.

Sammy Davis, Jr. has played no major or even minor role in the overall story so far, but he was a treat to see and hear in Sunday's episode, in an appearance made al the more enjoyable because Sammy was played by The Wire's inimitable Andre Royo.

Meanwhile, the overall rest of the story so far is appealing, and slowly gathering a full head of steam. Mad Men's Rich Sommer (whom I interviewed on my podcast years ago when Mad Men was young) was good to see as a husband with a problem in earlier episodes this season. But the most explosive development so far came from another couple and the wife on Sunday who wanted her husband to be a little more rough in their love-making.  He gives every indication that that's just not in him - until he erupts in violence that brings Masters and his assistant running into the room to stop the action.

The assistants threads - Masters and Johnson each have one, as per their agreement - has possibilities, but their being married, secretly at first, now revealed, is a bit contrived.   But that's ok, as long as the Masters and Johnson story progresses on its rocky road, which I'm eager to see.


See also Thomas Maier: Masters of Sex and Biography Come to Life ...Masters of Sex 3.1: Galley Slaves ... Masters of Sex 3.2: The Shah, the Baby, and the Book ... Masters of Sex 3.3: The Bookstore ... Masters of Sex 3.7: Going Ape ... Masters of Sex 3.9: Calling Hugh Hefner ... Masters of Sex Season 3 Finale: Cliffhanger

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Marshall McLuhan, Donald Trump, and the Revenge of Cool

I'll be in Toronto,  Friday October 14 - at the Toronto School: Then, Now, Next big conference - giving a talk about Marshall McLuhan, Donald Trump, and the Revenge of Cool (expanding a bit on an earlier talk of the same name I gave at the New York Society for General Semantics meeting at the Players Club in New York City on September 9, 2016).

Here, for those who can't wait, or want a taste of my talk, or won't be able to make it to Toronto at all, is a slightly expanded version of my abstract (updated on 13 October 2016):

It may seem strange to characterize Donald Trump, and his angry, aggressive rhetoric as "cool" in the McLuhanesque sense, but most of his statements, especially those on Twitter where he frequently posts, contain almost no content. You can't say much anyway in just 140 characters, but Trump says whatever comes into his mind, claiming one day that he's "softening" his position on immigration, the next day that he's really "hardening" his position, and the day after that he's softening. Like all cool presentations, this allows his supporters to see whatever they want to see in his tweets and other statements. McLuhan might have said that Trump as a politician is all medium and no content. The dark side of this is that, just as the cool medium of television flipped into maximum participatory violence in the 1960s, so Trump and his ice storms of cool have already begun flipping into violence at his rallies.   But cool can taketh as well as giveth not only for society, but the candidate who plies it.   Trump's stiffness with the teleprompter, and his egregious lack of preparation for his first debate with Hillary Clinton, are hallmarks of his cool, which may be poised to exert its revenge on Trump. And his vulnerability to release of a hot recording of explicit, sexually abusive remarks in October 2016 - which caused him to plummet in the polls and lose the support of dozens of officeholders in his own party - speaks to the fragility of cool. At the same time, the propensity of Trump's core supporters, i.e., those most caught up in the cool, to continue to see and hear whatever they most want in their candidate, provides the candidate with a rock-solid floor of devotees, whatever he may actually do or say, or whatever reports of earlier misconduct may reveal.

For more about the conference, here's the final program.   Come on by if you can.  I'll be on a 3:30pm panel on Friday, October 14.

For more about Trump, Clinton, and how McLuhan may have reckoned this campaign, see my McLuhan in an Age of Social Media, available on Kindle and in paperback.

Hillary Clinton Mops the Floor with Donald Trump in 1st 2016 Presidential Debate

I'm a Clinton supporter, so may be a little biased, but I've never seen such a wipe-out in a Presidential debate as what Hillary Clinton did to Donald Trump tonight.

She was clear, calm, logical, powerful, smiling - in contrast to Trump, who seemed beleaguered, tired, defensive, even incoherent at times, especially in foreign policy.  He was rude in many exchanges, even snapped at the moderator Lester Holt, and seemed rattled.  On several occasions, he resorted to bragging about his properties and accomplishments.

And she bested him, point by point, on such issues as

• ISIS, which Trump said Hillary had been fruitlessly fighting her "entire adult life"
• Trump's taxes, which Holt and Clinton both successfully pressed him on not releasing  - at several points, Trump even seemed to admit that he had never paid any taxes
• racial profiling, which Trump said he supported, despite its unconstitutionality
• Trump's birtherism and lifelong racism
• Trump's lies about never supporting the war in Iraq and the attack on Libya, which Holt also called him on
• Trump's ignorance of NATO, which he said he would relate to as a "business man"
• stamina, which Trump, clearly out of steam and almost haggard, said Hillary didn't have, while she stood there smiling, energized, almost radiant

In short, there was not a single issue on which Trump succeeded, while Hillary displayed mastery of all of them. Trump's job, in this debate, was to appear Presidential.   Instead, he appeared far less than Presidential than in previous weeks.

Can Trump survive this?  His supporters will continue to support him.  But it's hard to believe anyone on the fence won't want to jump off and run the other way.

Designated Survivor: Jack Bauer Back in the White House

Designator Survivor debuted on ABC tonight - just a few days after terrorist bombs in New Jersey and New York City fortunately took no lives, and the very night that riots in Charlotte, North Carolina put one man in the hospital in critical condition, in the wake of another black man shot under, at best, unclear circumstances in Charlotte, and another black man was shot by a cop, point blank, and killed, when he had his hands up in Tulsa.

As horrendous as that, our reality, is, what we see in Designated Survivor is worse: the Capitol building is demolished during a State of the Union address, and the President, VP, and his entire cabinet except the Secretary of Housing are killed.  And also the Supreme Court, most of the Joint Chiefs, and likely most Senators and Representatives.

This set-up for the designated survivor requires someone who can rise to the task.   Who better than Kiefer Sutherland, aka Jack Bauer, to step up - or allow himself to be put up, might be a more apt description. Sutherland's newly minted President Kirkman correctly doesn't have much of the swagger of Jack, but he has Jack's strength, and Sutherland has already made him a memorable character.

Natascha McElhone as the President's wife is also good, playing essentially the same character as she did in Californication (not a President's wife, but the same persona), and it works for Designated Survivor.  Kal Penn as a speech writer and the other supporting roles are also apt and well-played.

But the key here is the story.  Kirkman has to navigate the potentially disastrous currents of world diplomacy, while the FBI and Federal investigators try to figure out who blew up the Capitol.  I'm guessing, based on what we saw tonight, that it's a domestic group.

It's an especially strong scenario, made more acute not only by the terrorist attacks this weekend, but by the fact that we're of course in the final weeks of our very real and harrowing contest for the succession to the Presidency - i.e., the election of 2016.   If the attacks this weekend had taken any lives, the debut of Designated Survivor would no doubt have been postponed.   But our real campaign for President would have continued, as it should.   That's the difference  between entertainment (the debut tonight) and real life.

Good for ABC for providing a little more drama to all of this - fortunately, in this case, fictional, which we can sit on the edge of our seats and enjoy.


  terrorist squirrels and bombs in NYC

#SFWApro

Metaphors, Skittles, and Free Speech

Earlier today on MSNBC, conservative radio host and Trump supporter Hugh Hewitt championed "metaphor" in his response to the criticism Donald Trump, Jr. (the candidate's son) has received for his comparison of US immigration policy regarding children to ingesting a handful of Skittles candy, some of which may be poisoned.

We don't want to live in a society, Hewitt nobly proclaimed, in which politically-correct thought police ban use of metaphors.

Now that's something which I, and I would bet any rational person, would strongly support.  A world without metaphor would be dull and dismal and limited indeed - because, as Marshall McLuhan liked to say, punning on the poet Robert Browning, one's reach must exceed one's grasp, or what's a metaphor?

But Hewitt's proclamation is incomplete, to the point of being disingenuous.  For surely Hewitt would agree that we must be free to criticize and denounce metaphors, when we find them dehumanizing. Surely Hewitt is not saying that sons of Presidential candidates, or anyone for that matter, should be able to tweet whatever they want in some kind of zone that protects them from scathing criticism?

As repulsive as so much of the Trump campaign has been, I would never advocate or even imply that he and his ilk should be silenced.   I agree with Louis Brandeis that "the remedy to be applied [to falsehoods and fallacies] is more speech, not enforced silence".  Surely that applies to demeaning metaphors.

Taking the Show on the Road

Paul Levinson's Upcoming Events

Hey, I'll be making four public appearances in the weeks ahead, and I figured I might as well tell you about them ...

Date City, State Venue Event Sep 23, 2016 11:00 AM Washington, D.C., 19th Annual International Mars Society Convention talking about Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection of Space Travel and Religion w/James Heiser, Michael Waltermathe, Lance Strate, and Nicole Willett; convention program Sep 23, 2016 4:00 PM Baltimore, MD Baltimore Book Festival Getting Published: The Nitty Gritty - discussing various paths of publication, crowdfunding, and tips for embarking on your own career as an author; convention program (I was just invited, so I don't yet appear on the program, but I'll be there!) Oct 14, 2016 3:30 PM Toronto, Ontario The Toronto School: Then, Now, Next lecture: "Marshall McLuhan, Donald Trump, and the Revenge of Cool"; convention program; see McLuhan in an Age of Social Media for more Oct 15, 2016 2:45 PM Callicoon, New York 74th Annual N Y State Communication  Association talking about Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection of Space Travel and Religion w/Lance Strate, Molly Vozick-Levinson, Brittany Miller; convention program

Ray Donovan Season 4 Finale: Roses

The season four finale of Ray Donovan was the most satisfying and enjoyable of all the season finales of this series, so far, because--  [spoilers follow]

Stephen King's 11.22.63 on Hulu: Three-Part Drama in Eight Episodes

I finally got around this week to streaming Stephen King's 11.22.63 on Hulu, based on his novel of the same name.  Before I say what I liked and didn't about the short TV series, here's a little context:

Although I think King is a masterful writer, the fantasy/horror/science fiction nexus of most of his work never appealed to me, either in print or on screen.  I had hopes for his CBS-TV series, Under the Dome, but they were pretty quickly dashed.

On the other hand, I consider the assassination of John F. Kennedy the defining moment of my life and our age, even given the close contention for that destructive apex by 9/11.   And time travel has been a consuming passion for me, as a reader, viewer, and author.   Indeed, my Loose Ends saga, begun as a novella published in Analog Magazine in 1997, was all about a time traveler in Dallas on November 22, 1963.   So I approached 11.22.63 with great expectations.

These were only partially rewarded, and they all came in the last episode of the series.  But they were impressive, and well worth awaiting.

Although the series consists of eight episodes, I see it as essentially a three-part drama:

The first part was an enjoyable enough, workmanlike presentation of the hero being drawn into time travel - going back for a quick jump to prove to himself that the time travel is real, figuring out how he can have money in the past, those bells and whistles are always fun to hear and see.  But we've seen and heard all of them many times before.

The second part, at its worst, had nothing to do with the JFK assassination, and dramatically brought into the story some of the literal bleeding that I like least about King's tales.  Even when this took place in or near Dallas, it was at best a distraction and at worst an ugly story that I didn't want to see.

But the final act was masterful, and, in and of itself, a masterpiece in time-travel storytelling.  In stories in which the time traveler is trying to stop a momentous event like an assassination, the options are limited and daunting to pull off with originality.  If the traveler doesn't succeed, is that because she or he unknowingly made the bad event happen?  If the traveler does succeed, does the world get better as intended, or does it get even worse due to an unintended consequence?

In a riveting, magical final hour, 11.22.63 keeps you breathless and guessing, and does this not only for the event at hand, but for the personal life of the time traveler, powerfully played by James Franco.  Although seven hours is a long time in preparation, I strongly recommend 11.22.63 for its astonishing, hard-hitting, heart-rending rollercoaster of a finale, which will stay with you for a long time.

Tyrant Season 3 Finale: A Sarcastic "Good Morning," and "Afraid It Does" and More Than Enough to Continue

Tonight's Tyrant Season 3 finale was strong, which makes me hope it's indeed just a season finale and not a series finale.  FX, for its part, has dumbly cancelled the series, leaving it hunting for a new channel, which I hope it lands.

This finale had a lot to commend it.  Among my favorite scenes, and there were many, was Molly riding Barry in loveless sex so she can have another baby.   I mean, it was a sad, unpleasant scene, but very well played.

Also memorable was General Cogswell's goodbye to Leila, on the phone, preceded by his frank conversation with Exley.  On a night when Trump, our real-life tyrant wannabe in America, was trashing our generals at the Commander-in-Chief Townhall - saying they're "rubble" - it was good to see a fictional general comport himself so well.

And speaking of military leaders, we got a powerful, even stunning scene from Bassam's chief military man Colonel Maloof, who tells Bassam the truth - which is, that Barry can't survive without Maloof and his military support, which makes Barry/Bassam serving at his Colonel's pleasure rather than vice versa.   Maloof even sarcastically says "good morning" to Bassam, to underscore his point that he's waking the President up to reality.

The Daliya, Leila, Sammy, and Al-Qadi  threads were a little obvious and/or maudlin, but that's ok, because they provide ample material for another season or more.  And the very last scene, with Bassam looking at the painting his son Ahmed has commissioned for him, newly hung on the wall, replacing the portrait of Jamal who was not Ahmed's father, was good, too.  Barry's "I'm afraid it does" comment about how well the portrait suits him was a perfect last word for this season finale, and I'm looking forward to more.

See also: Tyrant 3.1: Barry -> Bassam ... Tyrant 3.2: Whither Molly? ...Tyrant 3.3: Double Death ... Tyrant 3.5: Bassam and Daliya ...Tyrant 3.8: Poor Bassam ... Tyrant 3.9: Al-Qadi and Tea

And see also: Tyrant 2.1: The Tyrant's Character ... Tyrant 2.5: The Caliphate ... Tyrant Season 2 Finale: Deserves to be Renewed 

And see also: Tyrant: Compelling Debut ... Tyrant 1.2: The Brother's Speech and His Wife ... Tyrant 1.3: A New Leaf? ... Tyrant 1.4: Close to the Bone ...Tyrant 1.6: Don't Mess with Jamal ... Tyrant 1.7-8: Coup ... Tyrant 1.9: Tariq ... Tyrant Season 1 Finale: The Truest Tyrant

#SFWApro



and earlier in the Middle East ...

Winner of Portable Story Time-Travel Writing Contest

This just in from the Portable Story Series Time-Travel Writing Contest, which I was honored to judge:

BIG NEWS! We're delighted to announce the winner and runners-up for our second short story contest, our Time Travel contest!

Congratulations to CHRISTI NOGLE and her winning story, CUBBY. CUBBY will be read by a narrator and recorded at CDM Sound Studios, Inc. in Manhattan. The Grand Prize audio production of the story will be posted for download in October.

Christi teaches college writing in Boise, Idaho. She has published fiction in the local Log Cabin Literary Center's Writers in the Attic anthology. This is her first story distributed to a national audience.

Congratulations also to the runners up, including:

Imminent Domain, by David Armstrong
Time and H. G. Wells, by Robert Grossmith
Our Friend John, by Christopher Fox
Somewhere Else, by Ryan Bloom
Hands of Time, by Carolyn Croop

Many thanks to our Time Travel contest judge, Paul Levinson. And writers, thank you for your submissions; we couldn't do Portable Story Series without you!

STAY TUNED, as we'll be announcing our newest contest theme soon! In the meantime, you can download our inaugural winning story (and donate!) here: http://portablestoryseries.com/#listen

Narcos 2: In League with The Godfather Saga

My wife and streamed Narcos 2 on Neflix the last two evenings, and, what can I say, it was outstanding, a stand-out masterpiece in both true-crime and crime fiction drama, in any medium.  I liked it even better than the first season, and I would now place it in league with The Godfather trilogy and The Sopranos.

Pablo Escobar's crew is portrayed in vivid and memorable detail.  Limon the driver ... La Quica the hitman ... Blackie the masterful bomber ... everywhere you turn in this story you find a subplot as riveting as the overall drama, and acted with style and precision (Limon by Leynar Gomez, La Quica by Diego Cataño, and Blackie by Julián Díaz).

As the pressure mounts on Escobar and the Medellín Cartel, he and we can never be sure who is still loyal.   The story has some shockers, especially if you're not familiar with the real history.   The pressure comes from so many interlocking sources that, as was the case in the first season, you find yourself admiring Escabar's intelligence and survival skills, despite the murders that he ruthlessly dishes out, especially when he's angered.   In addition to (most of) the government of Colombia including its President, and the US DEA, Escobar must fend off increasingly damaging attacks from the rival Cali Cartel and a brutally effective rightwing military group, Los Pepes.   Even worse for Escobar, these groups have an alliance, uneasy but effective enough for the DEA - or at least one agent, Peña - to funnel high-tech surveillance info to Cali and Los Pepes.

Even a fleeting knowledge of history will tell you how Escobar's story ends. What you may not know, though, is the lack of telecom sophistication that sealed his fate, or the joy he took in just buying and eating strawberries and creme like any other citizen of Medellín (assuming that's true, but touchingly shown in the series).  But the bigger questions attendant to his life of crime continue.  Miguel Uribe, husband of Diana Turbay - tragically killed by Colombian National Police in 1991 during a botched rescue attempt after Escobar had kidnapped her (portrayed in Season 1) - told me at dinner in New York City in the late 1980s that the drug cartels wouldn't have grown rich and powerful in his country had there not been such a keen taste for the white powder in ours. And that problem obviously still remains.

And this means there's more than ample Narcos story to tell for a third and subsequent seasons, which I hope are made.  As for the first two, they shouldn't be mistaken for literal history - some of which is left out, such as La Quica's arrest in Queens, NY and his conviction for the bombing of Avianca Flight 203, for which he's still serving time in the U. S. - but that's the difference between documentary and docudrama.  Indeed, even documentaries sometimes leave out material that others deem important to the true story, but what we're left with in Narcos is a fabulous piece of work - not really the "magical realism" with which the narrator Agent Murphy frames the story (clever, given that the late Gabriel García Márquez, one of the pillars of magical realism, also penned News of a Kidnapping, about the cartel's kidnappings, including Diana Turbay) -  but a real epic of our time, or the time that led to our time, brilliantly told and directed, and indelibly acted by Wagner Moura as Escobar and Paulina Gaitan as Tata his wife.  Narcos, like all the great crime drama, takes its place not only with The Sopranos and The Godfather, but Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies - in other words, with stories of greed and yearning for freedom, and right and wrong, and establishment vs. anti-establishment, as old as our very humanity.

See also Narcos on Netflix: Outstanding

#SFWApro



a different kind of crime

Tyrant 3.9: Al-Qadi and Tea

In many ways, Al-Qadi was the centerpiece of Tyrant 3.9.   Everyone wants him dead or neutralized.

The Caliphate wants him dead, seeing correctly that he's the last chance for any kind of unification in Abuddin, given his alliance with Leila.  In a scene in which a pot of tea never had so much pivotal power, his wife Nafisa can't bring herself to poison her husband with a cup of tea.  And he - because he's a fundamentally good person - can't bring himself to let her poison herself, after challenging her to drink the tainted tea.   Given Annet Mahendru's prior record of playing characters who die - actually, just one, but it was a major character on The Americans - I was pretty sure she was a gonna, but glad to see that she's still alive.

But Al-Qadi also faces a threat from the other side, with Bassam, getting worse and worse as a tyrant, setting loose his military to confront Leila.   Fortunately the American general disobeys orders and prevents the Abuddinian military from proceeding.   I like Chris Noth's General Cogswell, and hope this doesn't mean he's recalled or whatever and therefore off the show.

Back to Bassam, he's really dug himself into a huge hole, egged on by his now maniacal wife, and their thirst revenge for the murder of their daughter.   He has Daliya locked up.   She was wrong and Leila was right when she warned Daliya about Bassam - he may love Daliya, but that didn't stop him from arresting her.   And her going on a hunger is a strong next move in this chess game.

Will he let her die?   My prediction: he won't, and he'll break free of the downward spiral of Molly and revenge at all costs.   But then again, I'm an optimist, and we'll just have to see in the season finale next week.

See also: Tyrant 3.1: Barry -> Bassam ... Tyrant 3.2: Whither Molly? ...Tyrant 3.3: Double Death ... Tyrant 3.5: Bassam and Daliya ... Tyrant 3.8: Poor Bassam

And see also: Tyrant 2.1: The Tyrant's Character ... Tyrant 2.5: The Caliphate ... Tyrant Season 2 Finale: Deserves to be Renewed 

And see also: Tyrant: Compelling Debut ... Tyrant 1.2: The Brother's Speech and His Wife ... Tyrant 1.3: A New Leaf? ... Tyrant 1.4: Close to the Bone ...Tyrant 1.6: Don't Mess with Jamal ... Tyrant 1.7-8: Coup ... Tyrant 1.9: Tariq ... Tyrant Season 1 Finale: The Truest Tyrant

#SFWApro



and earlier in the Middle East ...