More Than Honorable Mentions (alphabetical):
A Place To Bury Strangers - “I Know I’ll See You”
The Black Angels - “Black Grease”
The Flaming Lips - “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song (With All Your Power)”
French Kicks - “So Far We Are”
Islands - “Don’t Call Me Whitney, Bobby”
Morningwood - “Body 21″
The Muggabears - “I’m Coming True”
Oxford Collapse - “Please Visit Your National Parks”
The Raconteurs - “Intimate Secretary”
The Roots - “Here I Come” (feat. Malik B. & Dice Raw)
The Secret Life Of Sofia - “We May Find A Pearl”
Takka Takka - “Enough”
The Thermals - “A Pillar Of Salt”
The Walkmen - “Louisiana”
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - “Gold Lion”
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“Today, I am announcing that, after much thought and prayer, I have decided not to seek re-election as your governor,” Blanco said.

After her ridiculous fumbling of the Hurricanes Katrina and Rita situations, it’s about time she actually made a sound decision. As someone from Louisiana (whose family still lives there) currently living in New York, I really wish there was some sort of Eliot Spitzer figure who could step up and kick the crap out of that state’s whole system of government. Someone would have to do a whole hell of a lot of convincing to get me to believe that either Bobby Jindal or John Breaux could be that type of governor. But they both have something going for them: neither is Kathleen Blanco.

Link:
The Times-Picayune: BLANCO BOWS OUT OF RACE
via Political Wire

Nobody should be surprised by the overreaction to the Hillary Clinton/Apple pseudo TV spot posted on YouTube. Reporters (and political consultants) simply love anything new and creative, even if its political impact is non-existent.

The ad, fashioned after an Apple ad from 1984, got tons of airtime earlier this week as the cable networks and talking heads buzzed about how creative it was, how technology is changing politics and what it all means for the future.

Here’s a news flash: the “ad” will have no political impact. Entertaining: Absolutely. Creative? Certainly. An interesting example of modern technology? Sure. But the ad won’t change any votes, and it is unlikely to create or re-make impressions of Senators Clinton or Barack Obama.

Interestingly, more people will see the ad on or hear about it from “traditional” cable or broadcast television networks than will watch it on YouTube. So if the ad had any impact anyway, it would be because of the reach of traditional forms of media, which played the spot repeatedly.

But at the end of the day, the YouTube ad will be a footnote about the campaign. It’s yet another example of the tactical nature of this 2008 campaign, and while tactics can and do matter, the Democratic race will be decided in Iowa and New Hampshire by a relative handful of Democratic participants, not by Washington, D.C. insiders who are all aflutter with the latest hip happening.

Technology obviously changes campaigns, and one day YouTube, Facebook and the Internet overall may determine who wins and who doesn’t. But for the 2008 cycle, it’s still those dreary “old media” that matter, no matter how many people want to get ahead of the curve and how creative and interesting the new technologies of the day.

And here’s the video again for those who may have missed it:

I mostly agree with Rothenberg that this type of ad is unlikely to change many minds or win many voters either way, but I also think it’s far from being ineffective. In a way, it crystalizes what may already be in the back of many peoples’ minds by suggesting that Hillary Clinton is the establishment candidate who always says the right, calculated, things to win people over. 1984 is about deception through making truth pliable as opposed to absolute and firm. Seeing an “ad” such as this might make people who had doubts about Clinton come to more firmly believe that she subscribes to such practices.

Basically, you never know what’s going to get a fence-sitter off their fence. It just could be something like this.

“She died in a freak rugby accident” became “She died in a rugby match for people with deformities.”

The lesson here is that subtitles for movies should probably be translated by someone from either the country of origin or destination.

Directed by Zack Snyder

300 could very well go down as a watershed moment in filmmaking. No, it’s not a particularly great movie; it is entertaining, but it’s not exactly an exercise in sophisticated storytelling. It is, however, groundbreaking as far as technical achievement. For years now, anytime a movie laden with CGI and special effects has opened, there have usually been complaints about the look of the effects and how they don’t look like they actually exist in the same world as the real elements. 300 partially avoids this by going for a stylistic look rather than a realistic one, but however the result is achieved, in the end, it feels as if the actors exist in the same world as the generated scenery and creatures around them. This technical success proves something that’s been creeping up for a while now — if a filmmaker wants to create a grand and detailed location, scouting and sets are much less necessary than they once were. One need only put their actors in a warehouse with green and blue screens.

Now, as for the storytelling itself, 300 — a retelling of The Battle Of Thermopylae — is rather simple. Three hundred Spartans stand against the largest army ever assembled for the idealistic cause of preserving their peoples’ freedom. Nearly every scene is a violent spectacle, but it’s hard to mark a movie about the Spartans — ancient Greece’s most aggressive and warlike group — as “gratuitously violent.” If you’re looking for gratuity, there’s the sex. Peppered throughout the film are a handful of scenes that rely on sex and/or the victimization of women — specifically that of Queen Gorgo. Of course, women in Sparta were not seen as equals of men, so some sort of representation of that is understandable, but these scenes seemed to follow all too closely the usual Hollywood crutch applied to female characterization in movies dominated by men. These scenes did not seem to be subscribing to any sort of historical accuracy, therefore their inclusion and execution seem trite and are disappointing.

Already, people have been drawing parallels between the film and current events. As someone who has read the 1998 comic book series on which it was based, I can attest that the original does seem, in retrospect, to portend the coming of some sort of conflict. Frank Miller is, after all, known for injecting his politics and world-view into his works (Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Give Me Liberty), so it’s no stretch to assume that he similarly did so with 300. If so, his tale of “the forces of freedom” taking on those ideologically opposed to such in a more or less black and white conflict seems particularly anticipatory of the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s inept prosecution of the war on terror. But, really, the Persian army is not the greatest analog for Al Quaeda; the Persian forces were massive and attacked out in the open en masse, presenting a clear target to be countered. Painting such a threat as that in black and white, good versus evil terms is much easier to do than with an enemy who attacks from the shadows and rarely, if ever, engages directly or in large numbers.

For that matter, cries of foul by the Iranian government about the portrayal of Persians as surrogates for themselves are particularly specious. If you want to complain that all the Greeks in the film are portrayed by people with lighter skin and have European accents and that the Persian hordes are composed of people of dark skin with particularly non-Western sounding accents, there’s legitimate concern to be had there. I’m no expert on the racial makeup of the groups involved in the actual historical conflict, so I can’t attest to any authenticity or lack thereof on this point, but it was particularly striking. But please, unless Iran suddenly turns into a superpower that can threaten to dominate the rest of the world, the idea that this movie is meant to advance Western dislike of Persian descendants is patently ridiculous.

I have to say, the representative from the Department of Transportation handled himself as well as could be expected for someone facing, by himself, hundreds of people who strongly disagreed with him. During parts of his presentation, and during comments and questions asked by people opposing the proposed reorganization of 4th, 6th, and 7th Avenues, there were outbreaks of yelling in protest and support respectively. The crowd in the auditorium was good about keeping the outbreaks short so that people could finish what they were saying, but the people outside the doors impressively raised a commotion to let it be known when they disagreed or agreed. It can be said — and was said last night — that Park Slope spoke with one voice. If any steps are taken to advance these proposals to practical fruition, it will clearly be done without the support of the community, which is something the DOT has supposedly claimed they will not let happen.

As for the presentation by the DOT spokesmen, itself, there were a few points that really stuck out:

First, among the statistics and figures that he threw out was the explanation that traffic performance is graded on a scale of A through F and that the city usually plans for any given traffic system to perform at a D level. The thing is that he, himself, claimed that 6th and 7th Avenues perform at a B or C. If this is the case, why is any change needed at all? The streets are performing above average as is, so why screw that up?

Second, no matter what arguments were made to the contrary, the DOT rep refused to allow that traffic would flow faster on the avenues or that the side-streets would receive more traffic either as a result of more through traffic traveling to the avenues or from people having to circle blocks to get onto the avenue traveling in their direction. Statistics were offered by some and dismissed out of hand. Or the rep would just avoid answering with a straight answer.

Third — the elephant in the room. The Atlantic Yards. The DOT rep avoided talking about the project and claimed it had no bearing on this proposal. For the same reason, the person chairing the committee meeting attempted to keep people from asking about it — even in direct relation to this situation. According to the DOT rep, the only new traffic generated by the proposed change would be intra-neighborhood. He refused to entertain the possibility that people would want to use the reorganized avenues to cut through Park Slope to get from one place to another. Basically, all his proposals and theories seemed to hinge on unchanged traffic volume. Anytime someone tried to ask how increased traffic from the Atlantic Yards area would affect this, he simply, unbelievably, claimed it had little or no bearing on the proposal. How does an estimated increase of nearly 4,000 cars at rush hour not cause problems in the surrounding areas? If he could have properly explained that, it would have helped his case. But because he refused to explain, the assumption has to be that there is no explanation.

In the end, the opinions of the community were heard: Park Slope does not want 6th and 7th Avenue to be one-way streets, and in fact, would like 8th Avenue and Prospect Park West to also become two-way. As for 4th Avenue, I don’t think anyone is a great fan of it the way it stands, but, as far as I can tell, no one likes the proposed change there either.

Now, we wait and see if our voices will be heard or ignored.

Update - Related Links:

The Daily Gotham: One Way! No Way! DOT faces Park Slope Ire

And Streetsblog has a bootleg copy of the slideshow the DOT gave as well as a summing up and photos of the meeting.

via TV Squad

And now there’s speculation that this proposal has to do with the Atlantic Yards project? What a headache that whole development is going to be.

So, what am I going to do about it? Well, for one, I’m planning to attend the Community Board meeting tomorrow and urge anyone else in the area to do the same. Here’s the info:

Thurs. March 15
6:30 PM

Community Board 6 Meeting
New York Methodist Hospital
506 6th Street (7th & 8th Avenues) Auditorium

But perhaps worst of all is that when all is said and done, three elections will have been paid for to figure out who will serve out Yvette Clark’s four year term. Three elections in a eight or nine period for one seat just seems silly.

Link:
The Politicker: Lots of Elections in Brooklyn’s 40th