Did Dan Rather just dis me?

DanRatherandMeI forgot to post this when it was called to my attention last month. Waywire, the news startup backed in part by Cory Booker, has engaged Dan Rather as one of its faces, and in this video segment, Dan Rather calls me one of the “Top Anchors” of the Web.

I come right after Matthew Keys, the Reuters social media editor who was subsequently indicted with aiding hackers. (Can’t say Dan isn’t still ahead of the big stories!)

But it’s what Dan Rather said about me that had me sideshifting from amused to bewildered. I think I confused the fella.

He seems really bewildered by my twitter bio. I mean, it’s an honor just to be noticed, but anytime someone feels obligated to say the phrase “all due respect,” you know they probably don’t have much.

[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtcmxr_lmOw[/tube]

For the record, pop historian is an established term these days. Both the esteemed Simon Schama and Stephen Ambrose have worn the mantle. And I proudly do, too. It allows me to keep talking about the past without having to publish research papers that put people to sleep.

Like I said. It’s an honor to be noticed.


Are Disney’s Magic Kingdom Google Maps images fake?

What’s the deal with these bird’s-eye photos of Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida? They appear on Google Maps when you zoom in and click “Satellite.” They seem fabricated. Why?

1. Parades don’t do that.

MKOverviewGM

Check out the configuration of the parade. Normally, the enter the Hub from the bridge at 10 o’clock, travel clockwise, and exit at 6 o’clock. Here, the floats go round and round the entire Hub as if it’s a carousel. In real life, floats pack together, with lots of dancers between them, and with no large gaps. But look:

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NY Travel Festival wants to rock the world (& I’ll be there)

New York Travel FestivalOn April 20, a new breed of travel show will make its inaugural appearance. It’s called the New York Travel Festival, and as my friend Valarie D’Elia describes it, the TravFest “promises to reinvent the consumer travel show.”

Travel shows, if you have never been to one, are often big meeting halls full of lots of kiosks where semi-informed representatives jockey to hand out brochures about whatever they’re selling. In a separate area, you’ll usually find conference rooms, and at the head of those rooms, long tables where travel experts sit dutifully behind their name tags, pouring Dixie cups of water from a sweating pitcher and trying not to say anything too earth-shaking. Traditional travel shows are, ironically, a somewhat passive experience for audiences who presumably go because they’d rather be in motion somewhere.

Not this one. The New York Travel Festival is about vigor and action. Walking tours of New York City are built into the schedule. There will be food tastings. Experts will tell you how to explore corners of New York that most guidebooks and magazines shrug off. Even the panelists have been tasked to challenge each other — intellectually, not like the WWE — by taking opposing views of the same topic.

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Why ‘travel writing’ can cease to exist

I have a confession: I haven’t read a travel book in years.

I’ll dip in. But I usually can’t get myself enthused enough to finish. For a while, I wondered if something was wrong with me. I’ve worked in travel journalism for 13 years. Why do I get bored by travel writing?

It may say something about my poor introspection, but it took many years to figure it out.

For me, travel is about the place, not someone’s reaction to it. I would rather cut out the middle-man.

Travel isn’t just about vacations. It’s a study of history, food, people and nature. That’s why it’s inexhaustible.

So although I don’t read travel books, I am voracious about non-fiction books. Books about the history of salt, about Reconstruction, about a guy who grew up in Bombay, about the banana trade, about the heyday of silent movies in Hollywood. I always have at least 8 to 10 in the dugout, waiting for their turn to step up and knock me into their world.

All are the stories of other places. Isn’t that the essence of travel?

The concept of “travel writing” is so limiting. Far fewer people want to read about the act of travel (the revenue figures are cratering) but reading about the world has never gone out of style. The act of travel is a personal process, and it often involves details (taxicabs, tickets, uncomfortable beds) that obstruct actual learning. If you drop the “travel” and are just a “writer,” you haven’t lost a yard of territory. You are still covering the whole planet.

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The Modern Minstrels

Screen Shot 2013-03-14 at 17.47.27I’m struck by how many local news Web memes center on low-grade minstrelsy.

The classic entertainment trope of the happy minstrel refuses to die. For generations, the biggest form of American entertainment was the minstrel show, in which actors (both white and black) made themselves up with exaggerated and blackened features, spoke in a comic dialect, and played the fool. In the minstrel show version of America, black people were full of personality but ultimately harmless simpletons. They loped and jived and ate watermelon and possessed a childlike naïveté about the world. In the minstrel version of America, blacks gleefully traded the misery and poverty of their everyday lives for the opportunity to sing and dance and make white folks smile with a catch phrase or a lively “coon song.” Minstrels love telling tales to everyone they meet. They tattle on the misdeeds of others while they themselves are judged by audiences for their foolishness.

Here’s a little Original Coon for you. In the 1890s, former slave George W. Johnson recorded “The Whistling Coon,” and it became one of the first best-selling singles by an African-American the United States. Contemporary audiences thought the inhumane lyric (“He’s a limpy, happy, chuckle-headed huckleberry nig/…With a cranium like a big baboon”) was hilarious, but they also probably saw it as a harmless goof.

Here’s another standard minstrel show from the radio days. If anything, it’s milder than what Americans would have paid to see in the years after Reconstruction. Although contemporary audiences thought they were merely laughing at funny characters, it’s pretty obvious to our ears that they were participating in a dehumanizing exercise:

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Hatch Show Print in Nashville: iconic style, letter by letter [WATCH]

Hatch can reprint its greatest hits using the same elements

Hatch can reprint its greatest hits using the same elements

You may not know the name Hatch Show Print, but you know the style. Its block letters are visually synonymous with Nashville and country music history. When Hatch began business in 1879, Nashville was the fifth-largest printing center in the United States, and at that time, hand-assembled letterpress was how printing was done.

The middle years of the 20th century were hard on letterpress. Newer technologies rose to supplant the inky, time-consuming moveable type method, and both machines and their output were trashed. But Hatch’s curator and chief designer, Jim Sherraden, saw beauty in its imprecision, and he rebuilt the faltering business into an indispensable institution.

To someone in the 1880s, the blocky letterpress style that filled every handbill and advertisement simply signified disposable culture. Today, with so few practitioners, Nashville virtually owns the look.

I was lucky enough to be invited behind the scenes of Hatch Show Print.

The video shows you just how damn cool it is:

This graphic design stalwart merits its own book: Hatch Show Print: The History of a Great American Poster Shop. I want one.

Hatch Show Print

Letter by letter, page by page, we leave history behind


Congress demands answers on privacy from Disney: the letter

Today, Edward Markey (D-Mass.) wrote The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger demanding answers about the new MyMagic+ “magic bands” RFID-based wristbands that are being implemented at the Orlando theme parks.

“As a Co-Chairman of the Congressional Bi-partisan Privacy Caucus, I am deeply concerned that Disney’s proposal could potentially have a harmful impact on our children.”

This is a very interesting wrinkle. I’ve been talking about personal data collection, personalized content, and Disney for years, but who knew the three would collide in such a big way?

The complete letter follows. (h/t Epcyclopedia) (more…)


Manzanar, where decent Americans were destroyed [WATCH]

With everything except the central meeting hall in ruins, this memorial has come to stand for Manzanar. June 2013

With everything except the central meeting hall in ruins, this memorial has come to stand for Manzanar. June 2013

The history of the United States could fairly viewed as a succession of excuses for not living up to its contractual obligations.

All men were not created equal, according to the Declaration of Independence: Slaves were allowed. The Supreme Court said the Cherokees were a sovereign nation: The South took their land anyway. Every citizen was entitled to equal protection, according to the Fourteenth Amendment: Women still couldn’t vote for another 60 years, and the Civil Rights Act had to wait another century. Martin Luther King, Jr. went to Washington to cash a check, but his people are getting paid on the installment plan.

In our living memories, few stains are more indelible and illustrative than the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War Two. They were American citizens, but that didn’t matter to the government. They were locked away in one of 10 residence camps, and by the time they got out, many people had lost everything — homes, businesses, all gone, wiped out. George Takei and Pat Morita are just two of the well-known people who endured these places and rose above them. Many others were affected for the rest of their lives.

I recently went to the isolated Owens Valley in east central California for a forthcoming feature that will be published by the New York Post. In the spirit of my visit to the little-known concentration/POW camp of Andersonville, Georgia, I shot a video tour of Manzanar, which was made a National Historic Site 40 years after the war ended. By then, most of the barracks had been sold to soldiers for tool sheds and cheap housing. They usually bought them for more money than the typical detainee received from the government upon liberation.

Ironically, this National Park unit is run by the Department of the Interior, which is the very same government body that oversaw the incarceration of legal citizens through the War Relocation Authority. (more…)


How Ann B. Davis changed my life

One day, I talked to Alice on the phone

One day, I talked to Alice on the phone

I was a cub reporter for Entertainment Weekly. Now and then, I got juicy feature assignments such as the review of Saving Private Ryan on video or a rare interview with Christian Bale, but as a cub reporter, I was more often asked to create those little sidebars and boxes that the more experienced staff writers had no interest in doing. Today, twentysomething idealists sweat at long benches, hammering out posts to chase the day’s hot search terms. But then, I worked the phones for “Rent Check,” in which I asked famous people what movies they had rented recently. It was a grind and pretty dumb stuff, but there were fringe benefits.

I talked to some good people. Jerry Springer told me about his family’s tragic history with the Holocaust. Alex Trebek cryptically alluded to a dark period in his past. Don Knotts passed, saying he’d let the younger folks have their say, but my favorite “get” was Ann B. Davis.

In her own way, she was more reclusive than even Christian Bale. She had found God, retired from the rigors of television, and spent most of her time dwelling with an Episcopal community in Pennsylvania. She seemed mistrustful of secular life. This interview thrilled me: In middle school, I watched 90 minutes of The Brady Bunch every day on Channel 56 in Boston. I could tell you within two lines of the opening which episode it was. I even kept a handwritten checklist of them all. Ugly Aunt Jenny? Hatch mark. Bobby loves Jesse James? Hatch hatch. Cousin Oliver the Jinx? Hatch. (I hated that one.)

Anyway, I interviewed Ann and asked what she had watched recently. One of her answers was Tender Mercies, and the reason she gave was that Robert Duvall plays a man who faces difficult choices and makes the right one. Duvall was a good Christian man, she told me, and being a Christian woman, she admired his work and would see anything he was in. Her sense of faith, decent but not preachy, permeated her responses, which I appreciated, since I knew there were millions of Americans that would identify with her thoughts. Her movie selections felt as nurturing as Alice herself. (more…)


Why I prefer books

Bookstore, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

Bookstore, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

Books are benevolent furniture. They are organic, and like wood, they give a room a certain vibration. I do not trust anyone who doesn’t own any books, and if, when I visit someone’s home for the first time, I learn they only own coffee table books to arrange as conspicuous advertisements of their consumer preferences, I instantly become sensitive to their other flaws.

I do not like downloading books. I am aware the industry is headed that way and my preference puts me at an increasing disadvantage, and that disadvantage verges on tragic the longer I remain someone who likes to be published. E-books now have a market share of 22%, says Publishers Weekly. Considering Amazon.com itself as a market share of 27%, this era is even grimmer for bookstores than it is for books. I don’t like that, either.

I am told that I should embrace e-books. I am told this by publishers, who stand to save a fortune in manufacturing and shipping costs, and their profit-maximizing fantasy for me is repeated like a mantra from the many slavering tech junkies who swarm Twitter to praise any digital development as the tonic for all perceived ills. Never mind the fact that nearly no celebrated app or website or device is nearly as useful in practice as it is in its celebration, and most usually die off faster than the spring dandelion scourge. They’re like Hindu gods, these apps, or Catholic saints, each one designed to minister to another failing we forgot we had, and all of them in the long run impossible to satiate into permanent domesticity.

When I read a book, I can easily refresh my memory by flipping back to something I previously read. I have to make notes that remind me my mortgage is due, but my subconscious remembers that the passage I want fell this deep in the book, near that corner, on this side of the spine. If I try that with an e-book, I lose the sense of spatial relationships that usually governs my wits. I flail around the scroll bar like a bird in a hall of mirrors.

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