Holy Frig

In honor of the Honest Abe Lincoln penny pose struck by this cloud over Grand Falls, New Brunswick, I’m going to tell you the truth. Keeping up with the visual manifestations of iconic figures and forms has not been a priority of late . . . okay, it hasn’t been a priority for a while. Tracking and considering these happenings is a full-time job. Such sightings never stop, and they never will. It’s a fundamental aspect of our existence. Uploaded to YouTube on August 1, I just watched the video, viewer number 2,553,733. “Holy frig,” exclaims the man filming the sky.

The big picture is something I’m still trying to bring into focus, but for all of the differences in the countless individual stories, there are incredible commonalities. The commonalities are telling, though I’m still trying to crack the code. Recently I saw No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentary. Recollecting the angry audiences that booed him when he first went electric, Dylan said something like, “Whatever they were mad about had nothing to do with what they heard.” We all carry so much with us that a song, a certain noise, a shadow or a scar can flip all sorts of internal switches and that’s why life on this planet looks as it does.

I’m going to keep looking and kick around some of these ideas from different angles. Most of this will be done in private. Some of it, like this piece about writers not wanting to read, will be shared, at least once a month at Print magazine's Imprint. I’ll do my best to post updates here, though I anticipate they will remain infrequent. The choice bits that do pop up here will be of interest to me, though perhaps not to you. We’ll just have to see . . .

This Is Infotainment

I’ve never been to Australia, but from what I hear there is a different sense of time down there. This news item from the Macarthur Chronicle confirms my understanding. This article about the video above is from the paper’s October 28 issue, but the video was posted on Youtube a year ago. Hardly breaking news, or even news for that matter. The paper didn’t even bother to get the real name of the person responsible for the footage.

Someone using the handle “tubeoffroad” shot the video, thinking the wispy cloud resembled Jesus with outstretched arms. The video has gotten over 8,000 hits, which is nothing when compared to other similarly themed videos, some of which have been viewed over 400,000 times.

This particular video has also generated a smattering of comments, most notably one from tubeoffroad: “WOW! Today, 28 OCT 2008 I'm on the front page of Macarthur Chronicle local newspaper. Unbelievable! About time I made the front page.”

I’ve never even thought to look at Youtube for these sorts of clips, but I guess that’s because I’m interested in how the media gets hold of these stories. But, in this day and age, Youtube is a very real facet of the media. The viral nature of this website, and many others, is such that if you get enough people viewing whatever it is that you’ve created it becomes news. A great example is the Obama Girl. That video was originally posted in June 2007, and since then more than 10-million people have viewed it with new comments popping up every few minutes. The video and its star, Amber Lee Ettinger, have been topics of pretty much every major news outlet. So, tubeoffroad’s attitude is kind of understandable within this context, as s/he clearly had the expectation of the video translating to news media/pseudo-celebrity status.

I used the word on this blog for the first time a couple of posts ago, but this story is the essence of “infotainment.” I’d much rather squint my eyes and try to discern a religious or secular icon than spend my time figuring out which parts of the news are truly newsworthy and which parts are just people trying to get notoriety. I guess it’s all kind of the same anymore . . .