Petey Greene: Radicalizing Racial Discourse

I just finished watching the PBS documentary Adjust Your Color, on the life and times of Washington, D.C., radio and TV talk show host Petey Greene (RIP). Greene's story is remarkable: an ex-con and hustler turned community activist and self-proclaimed voice for the black community. Especially notable for me was the overlap between Greene's life story and that of the black pulp fiction icon Donald Goines, whom I wrote about last year. Both men emerged out of prison to take advantage of media opportunities that allowed them to address the ghettos out of which they had emerged. (Tragically, both men died young too.)

Here's a clip of Greene's most famous televised broadcast, in which he talks about the politics of black people eating watermelon. It's at once side-splittingly hilarious and dead-on serious. Above all, Petey Greene didn't like anyone -- black or white -- to "front," and pussyfooting around the issue of eating watermelon only distracted folks from consuming a fine piece of fruit meat.

Petey Greene (1931-1984)
From Petey Greene's Washington, D.C.
"Be Yourself" (1982)

Fußball Ist Geil

The winter break is over, and that means European league soccer is returning to action this weekend. I thought I'd celebrate with a fantastic YouTube find.

This clip (~1970s) from a West German television program features the (at the time) latest soccer-themed high fashion. The elite soccer league in Germany is called the Bundesliga, and the clothing on display in this broadcast is inspired by the colors and designs of Germany's most famous clubs (Schalke, Hamburg, Dortmund, etc.). All I can say: Wow.

Farred on SportsCenter

I just discovered Gelf Magazine's interview with Duke University Literature professor Grant Farred on the current state of ESPN's SportsCenter. It's a pretty entertaining read, with Farred coming up with some good one-liners about the qualitative demise of America's original televised sports talk show. Regarding SportsCenter's putatively dumbed-down programming these days, Farred intones, "Proliferation is the death of intelligence."

For a related story on the death of intelligent sports news media, see Josh Levin's "What's Wrong with Sports Illustrated" on Slate.

Making Meaning with New Media

How have new media phenomena like YouTube changed the way people interact with so-called "old" media? I'm fascinated by the ways in which Internet- and software-savvy people make and re-make meaning out of "what's presented to them" in media such as radio, television, and film. If, for example, a longstanding assumption in television studies has been the originary "encoding" of meaning by the television production apparatus (studios, corporate sponsors, directors and producers), how does the Internet allow users to not just "decode" televisual meaning but alter the terms by which code as such plays out in multiple media? In other words, after the rise of YouTube, is it possible to even speak of an originary moment of encoding that elicits practices of (audience) decoding? Or is it that YouTubers practice modes of encoding themselves -- ones that might be even more potent, durable, "popular," etc., than their small-screen counterparts?

These questions extend the pathbreaking audience-reception work of scholars like Stuart Hall and Henry Jenkins (who, it should be said, is actively pursuing new media inquiries that relate to his earlier scholarship). But there's also a general cultural awareness that things like YouTube are fundamentally challenging the encoding/decoding model of networked communications. "You" (you users of Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, etc.), after all, was Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" for 2006. Much has also been made of the fact that the best clips from Comedy Central's The Daily Show enjoy a "life" on YouTube that lasts well past the show's television broadcasts. And who could forget the Samuel L. Jackson vehicle Snakes on a Plane? It's been said that this movie's trailer, which was widely circulated on the Internet and which featured hilariously farcical dialogue about "motherfuckin'" snakes being on "motherfuckin'" planes, was the primary force behind its relative theatrical success.

Part of the mission of The Paperback Museum is to note the sundry social and cultural consequences that flow from unprecedented user "control" over old media "texts." For it cannot be taken for granted that such "control" is in fact "real," available to everyone, or properly "free" from the hierarchical constraints of old media consumption. Wary child of consumer culture that I am, I cannot fully give myself over to the rhetoric of consumer "choice" in certain realms of new media association. What are we "choosing" when we supposedly seize control over how we consume media? Why is making meaning for "ourselves," with the help of new media technology, such a seductive concept in our day and age? Are there ways in which even that act of personalist meaning-making is being commodified and put into the service of what might be called the "hidden hand" of new media regulation?