Good article from the “L.A. Times,” touching on how the Internet has forever altered television viewing habits and what this means for the business end of it:

Television production studio executives long have been wary of Hulu and other forms of Internet distribution, fearing they would lead to increased piracy and destroy lucrative secondary markets, including syndication and DVD sales. But video streaming services offered by Netflix, Hulu and Amazon.com are becoming an unexpected boon to the TV syndication market. By writing checks to license library content from networks, the Internet services are injecting new revenue into the TV business and breathing new life into middling shows.

“The introduction of the subscription video-on-demand platform has broadened the opportunities for exploitation of product in a very positive way for consumers and studios,” said Ken Werner, president of Warner Bros. domestic television distribution. “You do not need to accumulate 100 episodes of a series because 40 hours of programming is a lot, so many of these shows work perfectly well on these new services.”

Something the article does miss, though, is how television marathons and DVD have also altered our viewing habits. We like to gorge now, watch more than just a single episode at a time and lose ourselves in that world for hours. This is one reason serialized dramas such as “Mad Men,” “24,” “Breaking Bad,” and the like are such favorites. These shows are addictive — in the best way.

Yesterday, the wife and I watched 5 episodes in a row of “Sons of Anarchy,” and when a new DVD arrives via Blockbuster of “The Closer,” we usually knock out all four episodes in just a sitting or two.

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“Just look at the Old Testament.  They didn’t go out with the army first.  They sent the musicians out.” ~ Michael W. Smith

One year ago my good friend & songmate, BigDawg, and I decided to launch BigDawg Music Mafia to showcase the many creative ways our fellow patriots are getting engaged in the pop culture revolution, speaking truth to power through their God-given talents (songs, art, blogs, books, photography, poems, radio shows, film, humor, acting, etc).

Today, with 565 members/artists attracting over half a million site hits from around the world in our first year, we have plenty to say and an increasing number of visitors dropping in every day to “hear” us out.  With such a diverse group of artists with a wide range of talent, it is only natural that some of us would find ourselves joining forces on some cool collaborations/projects.

vimeo Get Off The Stage (The BigDawg Patriots Featuring Jana Seantelle)

Our latest project, Get Off the Stage, written by one of our members who goes by the name “Mick”, is described in an electronic press kit he recently released and distributed.  Here are some excerpts:

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Mike Flynn recently wrote a cri de coeur on Big Government asking why conservatives have failed to move back the needle on government spending despite the profusion of conservative think tanks, foundations, policy shops, grass-roots organizations, and sundry other pointy-headed groups, mostly based in Washington, DC (although every state now has their equivalents, usually in the state capital.)

Why? It’s the culture, smarty-pants.

By “culture,” I don’t mean Washington, DC culture. I mean pop culture.

While the brightest and most talented conservatives pour into DC and pump out one study after another, endlessly debating arcane policy with a handful of other pinheaded intellectuals, the left has been busy consolidating their iron grip on the real reins of power — movies, TV, music, art.

If half the conservatives who pine to work at Heritage or Cato would only turn their ambitions to moviemaking and showrunning, conservatism might have a fighting chance.

As it is, you can move the musical chairs in DC around all you want, but if you don’t recapture the culture — or even a healthy slice of it — you may win a political battle or two now and then, but you’re destined to always play catch-up in the war long-term.

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If you’ve been reading Righteous Indignation, you know Big Hollywood’s blogfather Andrew Breitbart accurately diagnoses the Achilles heel of conservatives in America as culture. For decades, we’ve been stuck in a rut when it comes to pop culture, journalism, academia, etc. We’ve been disengaged, and the times when we do engage, we’re reactive and imitative rather than proactive and compelling. So today, I’d like to highlight someone who is reversing that trend– a conservative pioneer in entertainment who’s self-made and independent, a man who’s broadening the conservative presence on radio past mere political talk, a man with a taco-loving dog named Hoogie. That man is Louis Fowler, and he needs  your support this very day– possibly this very minute!

Louis and his son Hoogie.

When Big Hollywood profiled my music back in November of last year, I got an email from Louis (I thought he was using a stage name). He asked if he could play a song of mine on his radio show “Damaged Hearing”, a 2-hour weekly program on a community radio station in Fort Collins, CO. I hadn’t seen a dime of music sales yet, so purely in the interest of my own vanity, I agreed and sent him an mp3. I tuned in to the station’s live stream while at work, and for the next two hours, I found myself confused, caught off guard. Where was the amateurism? Where was my embarrassment? Why did he know so much about pop culture? He had told me he was a conservative! This wasn’t all an elaborate ruse by an Obama plant, was it?

It was the day of the midterm election; he went through a playlist of politically-themed rock without any obvious, overplayed choices (except me, of course) and plenty of deep cuts, and he launched into a monologue sardonically tweaking Obama and his supporters. He joked about Obama’s birth certificate, not for the easy joke of mocking birthers, but to mock bubble-dwelling progressives who believe that every Republican is and always has been a birther. This wasn’t just conservative comedy– this was conservative comedy that was as funny as anything I was going to hear on late-night talk shows; it was brash, subversive, and unpredictable.  I broke out laughing at my desk and ended up posting a few comments on the Facebook thread he creates for every show.  I didn’t quite understand exactly what I had just experienced, but I knew I’d be back for more.

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Excellent article in Macleans last week:

Like many other teenage girls, Olivia regards the fight for female equality as over. “In the Western world, we’re pretty equal,” she says. 

She has every reason to think so. Going to university is a given. So is having a career—perhaps in business or maybe medicine. She’s surrounded by smart, independent women, including her mother, who holds a Ph.D. in education and is the director of LINCWell, a student enrichment support centre at St. Clement’s girls’ school in Toronto.

Yet Leanne Foster, whose position puts her in the daily orbit of the age-old divide between teenage girls and their mothers, is not as sanguine as her daughter about female equality. She sees a unique generation gap emerging: on one side, mothers who came of age during the women’s movement of the 1970s fighting for equal opportunities, “empowerment” through financial independence and rejecting female “objectification”; on the other, their daughters, raised in a hyper-sexualized culture replete with Bratz dolls, porn-inspired American Apparel ads, and the message telegraphed by Kim Kardashian and her tabloid-cover cohorts that a leaked sex tape is the quickest route to female success.

For these girls, Snoop Dogg’s misogynist Bitches Ain’t S–t is not an affront but a ring tone, and “slut” and “bitch” are not put-downs but affectionate greetings between female friends. Snooki, the 22-year-old star of the reality show Jersey Shore, whose ambitions consist of getting drunk, vomiting on camera, and spending days in a tanning salon, is the star of the hour. “I love Snooki,” says one 20-year-old. Olivia agrees. “It’s so ridiculous, it’s funny,” she says of the show. “I don’t relate that to my life at all. I wonder, ‘Why would you do that?’ But it’s enjoyable to watch.” (more…)

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All right! We blew it! My Generation, The Millennial Generation, totally fell for the oldest trick in the book and now we look like hopeless idiots in front of the whole world. What was our mistake? Youth. The veracity of naivete that only comes with inexperience, adolescence and a total lack of responsibility.

Characterized by our Pop Culture and Mass Media, we may participate in an election, try to be advocates for hope and change, but as long as “The Bachelor” and “Jersey Shore” succeed in the ratings, The Millennial Generation will be seen as having the same morals, values and ethics as the people who are on these reality shows.

We should know better. At least, with all the education we have had, you would think we might have picked up a thing or two in history class. But no, we are making the same mistake just as naturally and easily as the generation before us, the generation before them, and generations to come.

Despite all our potential and the efforts of our subculture, we allow propaganda to move us when it is there to seduce us; zeitgeist, to inspire us when it is there to distract us. (more…)

Fidel Castro, 2010. Mixed Media Silkscreen with Lipstick.

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Michael Moore gets it. He understands that politics follows the culture, not the other way around. He knows this so well that his to artistic call-to-arms is as matter of fact as it is sincere. (more…)

To anyone paying attention, Michael Jackson died sometime before 1989. Tragically, in just a few years following 1982’s “Thriller,” this unbelievably attractive and talented young man had switched races, started down a grotesque road of self-loathing, disfigurement and, through a series of increasingly bizarre antics, lost his status as a star by perfectly meeting my definition of celebrity: One who doesn’t let dignity get in the way of fame. Everything that happened after 1989 was so increasingly off-the-charts those of us who made fun of Elvis probably owe him an apology.

Yesterday’s clampdown of the news media and worldwide outpouring of grief for a man whose narcissism was so complete he had himself buried in a 14-karat gold coffin like some demented, disfigured, predatory pharaoh was nauseating. Sure, celebrate the music, but defying explanation is the lamenting and hushed, effusive praise for the man, a man so indulgent he reportedly left behind $400 million in debt, a man who admitted sharing his bed with young boys, hired a gay porn producer as his personal videographer, dangled a newborn baby over a third-floor balcony and laid out millions for a settlement rather than clear his name of child molestation charges. But there you go. Such is life in Celebrityville where all is forgiven except attempting to hold yourself to a higher moral standing. (more…)

Captain America was born to fight America’s real world enemies. He was first seen punching out Hitler on the cover of Captain America Comics #1, a year before the attacks on Pearl Harbor. But nearly 8 years after the attacks of 9/11, Cap is yet to be unleashed on Jihad. Not long after 9/11, likely feeling they had no choice, Marvel Comics made a half-assed attempt to pit Cap against what seemed to be an al Qaeda type group, but it was forgettable, with the terrorist leader having his ‘reasons’ and with Cap apologizing for us. It’s a sign of the times that there was not a Captain America movie on the fast track in Hollywood right after 9/11.

[click to enlarge]

I’m told that it would be considered ‘controversial’ for such a pop icon to take on today’s jihadists, but the controversy to me is that the most patriotic superhero of all time is still MIA against Jihad. For a time after 9/11, I was naive enough to believe I could write and draw a Captain America story where the jihadist’s get what’s coming to them, with no apology and with full fury. I stopped cold when I realized there’d be no chance in hell of Marvel Comics allowing Cap to say and do what had to be said and done against this enemy. I wised up and created the perfect enemy against Jihad. For more on that, please visit my blog. (more…)

The Main Point

The world view, or philosophical perspective, of Sarah Palin versus say, David Letterman’s or Katie Couric’s, is profound at its core. Not only are the philosophical differences profound, but the political implications of those differences are as equally profound.

Palin is the philosophical descendant of those who created this country’s constitution; Couric and Letterman,  on the other hand, like much of the Bi-Coastal Media/Entertainment Left, are more consistent with the self annihilating philosophy of moral relativism. While Palin is intelligent and constant in her views, I make no similar claims specifically about Letterman and Couric, relative to their views. They strike me as shallow and weak. Palin implicitly understands the limitations of Reason. Moral relativists do not. Our founding fathers also understood man’s limitations and established a constitution whose core principle was Liberty, supported strongly by laws to protect this Liberty. The Left, on the other hand, believe that “truth” can be imposed on individuals and society as a whole. Many have commented on the futility of the latter. Frederich Hayek’sThe Road To Serfdom is the clearest explanation of how that view ultimately and logically has lead to totalitarianism; the ultimate expression of political nihilism and its philosophical antecedent, moral relativism. (more…)

He may have further burnished his left-wing bona fides, but when it comes to winning elections David Letterman did his side no favors this week ‘joking’ about the statutory rape of Governor Palin’s 14-year old daughter. From the looks of this interview, She Who Strikes Terror In Leftist Hearts wants to turn the unsavory affair around into a push back against all of pop culture, which is certain to resonate, especially if we keep pushing back. Just compare the bitter, sour, twilight-of-his-increasingly-pathetic-career Letterman to this intelligent, poised, cheerful, vibrant woman with her horizons still open to everything. It’s kind of a no contest.

Most heartening is that unlike some on our side, the Governor seems to get it. If this unfortunate episode proves anything, it’s that Sarah Palin understands that a Republican is up against more than just their Democrat opponent and the mainstream media; pop culture is also waging ideological war on all things conservative and traditional. This is a reality we ignore at our own peril, and this week Governor Palin (and Carrie Prejean, for that matter) fought back and won wielding truth, good humor and dignity.   (more…)