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joshwatch

Joshwatch: I just taped an appearance on TXCN that’ll run hourly tonight and repeat sporadically through the weekend. If you don’t know what I look like, I’ll be the guy looking very somber in a dark blue mock turtleneck.
Barring an unexpected late-night bender, I should also be interviewed live on KVIL 103.7 (“#1 for Lite Rock!”) at 7:00 a.m. Sunday morning. My apologies if the interview’s Yawn Count exceeds its Coherent Thought Count.
And pick up Sunday’s paper — I’ll have a big story on the front page. (That’s what I’m busy talking about in all these spots.) Should have another one on Monday’s front page, too.

great political ads

Dallasites, if you get a chance, stop by the Sixth Floor Museum sometime before the end of January. (Of course, all Dallasites have already been to the Sixth Floor Museum — a.k.a. where Oswald plugged JFK — many times. It’s just about the only tourist destination of note in town, which makes it a mandatory stop when out-of-town visitors drop in. I’ve been at least a dozen times.)
Anyway, their temporary exhibit is called The Living Room Candidate, and it’s an entertaining video history of TV commercials from presidential elections past. (The non-Texans among us should head to the web site, which has most of the ads available for viewing.)
Don’t worry about the later years — go straight to the early stuff from the 1950s and 1960s. It’s fascinating to see how quickly the form evolved. Eisenhower’s commercials were almost painfully earnest — the look of a military man forced to interact with The Public and mouth political hackery with fake conviction. But it’s not surprising he won two terms: Adlai Stevenson’s ads were ludicrously dull talkers that wouldn’t hack it on air today.
But the one election you want to check out is 1964, LBJ vs. Goldwater. It’s not hard to figure out why Johnson won in a landslide. Goldwater’s ads were stuck in Eisenhower form: people sitting in chairs and talking to the camera (if occasionally looking crazed while doing it). His only innovations seemed to be fascist parodies that seem to blame the nation’s ills on outtakes of West Side Story.
But LBJ’s ads were works of art. Emotionally manipulative, sure, but works of art nonetheless.
The most famous one, of course, is the daisy ad. That’s the one that features a cute little girl picking petals off a daisy — then segues into a vision of a nuclear holocaust, while an off-camera LBJ intones biblically: “We must either love each other…or we must die.” It’s an incredibly cheap shot (that only aired once), but it is nonetheless some powerful shit.
The ads, viewed as whole, did an amazingly good job of painting Goldwater as, well, batshit crazy: a loose cannon itching to nuke the Soviets, the Chinese, the Vietnamese — hell, maybe the Belgians if he got some bad waffles one morning. Johnson clearly had real filmmakers working for him — the quality of direction is much higher.
But the best of them all is Confessions of a Republican. It’s four minutes of an actor playing a Republican who doesn’t want to vote for Goldwater. It’s amazingly effective at seeding doubts and, even though it’s clearly an actor with a script, it seems infinitely more real than the “real” people in modern ads. I mean, were I a Republican in ’64, I think I’d be forced to think things through after seeing this. In this New Yorker article, professional quote machine Kathleen Hall Jamieson calls it the one of the most effective ads of all time. (Transcript here.)
If my eye for actors is right, the Humphrey campaign tried bringing the same guy back to do a somewhat similar ad against Nixon in ’68. But it’s nowhere near as effective — the dialogue is much obviously politically driven, the reasoning is gone, and the air of self-evaluation has disappeared. But honestly, I think a “Confessions of a Republican”-style ad could be used by either party effectively in ’04. Even the scripted can seem sincere.

acl festival schedule

The schedule is up for the Austin City Limits Festival next month. A tentative suggested plan:
Friday:
4-5 p.m.: Sloan (although Neko Case is tempting)
[early dinner]
6-7 p.m.: Broken Social Scene
7-8 p.m.: Ryan Adams (but leave a little early and catch some of…)
7:15-8:15 p.m.: Rebirth Brass Band (but leave a little early and move to…)
8-8:45 p.m.: Franz Ferdinand (although Gomez is tempting)
8:45-9:55 p.m.: Los Lonely Boys
[party]
Saturday:
[sleep in late, then straggle in late to…]
2-3 p.m.: Josh Rouse
3-4 p.m.: Old 97s
4-4:45 p.m.: Bruce Robison (and hope he plays this song)
[early dinner, unless I grow remarkably more pro-Modest Mouse]
6-7 p.m.: My Morning Jacket (although Los Amigos Invisibles is very tempting)
7:15-8:15 p.m.: Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (leaving early for…)
8-8:45 p.m.: The Neville Brothers
8:45-9:55 p.m.: The Pixies
[party]
Sunday:
[sleep in late, a hearty migas brunch, then…]
1:45-2:30 p.m.: Calexico
2:30-3:30 p.m.: The Roots (also tempting: Doyle Bramhall and Shelby Lynne)
3:30-4:30 p.m.: Ben Kweller (but leave after three songs for…)
4-5 p.m.: Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra (but leave after two very lengthy songs for…)
4:30-5:30 p.m.: Elvis Costello
5:30-6:30 p.m.: Spoon
[get in the car, drive back to Dallas, moderately sad over missing Wilco, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, David Garza, Cake, and Ben Harper in the evening]
Sorry I haven’t been posting much lately. My pace will pick up soon, I hope.

chanda oly update

ChandaWatch: She won her first-round singles match over the koala Samantha Stosur. But the fact it took her three sets (6-2, 6-7, 6-0) doesn’t bode well. Next up: the Zimbabwan menace Cara Black. If she gets past Black, it’ll be the 2 seed, Amelie Mauresmo, in the octofinals.
The Chanda/Venus doubles team faces the Chinese Ting Li/Tian Tian Sun duo later today.