Tagged: Barack Obama
Crowdsourcing art
Chris Milk, who has directed videos for Kanye West, U2, Courtney Love, and Barack Obama, is assembling a few thousand volunteers to complete an animated music video for Ain’t No Grave, title track of the last album Johnny Cash recorded.
The Johnny Cash Project invites participants to use custom drawing tools to create the 1,368 frames in the 2 minute, 51 second, video. Since more than one artist will end up submitting artwork for each frame, the video will look different each time it’s played. Writes Milk:
Strung together and relayed in sequence, your art, paired with Johnny’s haunting song, will become a living, moving, and ever changing portrait of the legendary Man in Black.
White House taps the Da Vinci of data
President Barack Obama has appointed visual data guru Edward Tufte (previously mentioned: here) to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. Tufte will advise on such things as the Recovery.gov website, where citizens can punch their zip code into a track-the-money map and see all the recovery projects in their area.
Bob Garfield of New York public radio’s On The Media interviewed Tufte about the appointment this week (audio embedded below; transcript here).
GARFIELD: Tufte has inspired a generation of innovators with his ideas for the efficient, clean and rich presentation of information. He’s a fan of The New York Times website, the iPhone, and, most of all, the lowly sports page, with its tables and stats a reader can grasp in an instant. But he’s in a constant war with the average website, cluttered with scroll bars, logos, jargon and meaningless graphics.
EDWARD TUFTE: They make the simple complex. The design hand in there is from the marketing department, and it’s unfortunate because our eye-brain system is so powerful, in one long glance, maybe a 12-second glance at something, probably 120 megabits of information goes to our brain. And there’s no reason we have to be looking at impoverished materials because we process material at enormous rates.
Tufte’s first piece of advice to government: its websites should imitate the best news organization sites.
Hat tip: FlowingData.
Hold the canonization – updated
Arch-conservative David Frum stiffed CBC Radio’s flagship The Current this morning [see update below], failing at the last minute to show up for a heavily promoted interview on his reincarnation as a thoughtful moderate. The program was forced to recycle a dumpster diving documentary in place of what I fear would have been the latest in a series of fawning interviews.
Let’s hope this will, in Canada at least, slow the media juggernaut bent on canonizing Frum as discerning paragon of moderation.
Frum, as the saying goes, was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. His father was a wealthy dentist turned wealthier real estate developer; his mother was, well, you know who is mother was. At a time when right wing media barons were ascendant in Canada, young Frum fashioned a public career rooted in contempt for people (and regions) who don’t measure up to his own social Darwinist attainments.
Of late, he has bravely shown distaste for those who paint rifle targets on images of America’s first black president. He evokes mild embarrassment at keeping intellectual company with the likes of talk show bully Rush Limbaugh. He blows hot and cold on ditzy Sarah Palin. This makes him moderate only to those whose political spectrum equates birther whack jobs with such leftist radicals as Barack Obama.
Check the record: Frum staunchly opposes public health care. If it were up to him, wealthy people would buy their own care, middle class people would be OK until their insurance ran out or was canceled due to illness, and the poor and those with pre-existing conditions could rely on charity, thank you very much. He fought to preserve a system that produces the worst health outcomes in the industrialized world (and a pretty good swath of the developing world).
He opposed Supreme Court nominee Harriet Meirs because she was insufficiently pro life.
In justifying his vote to put Palin an old man’s heartbeat away from the oval office, he wrote: “It says something important that so many millions of people respond to her as somebody who incarnates their beliefs and values. At a time when the great American middle often seems to be falling further and further behind, there may be a special need for a national leader who represents and symbolizes that middle.” Oh my.
Saint David? Hold the holy water, please.
[UPDATE: Frum apparently made it in time for the Eastern Time Zone and later editions of the show.]
Editor-in-chief
A photo recently added to the White House photostream on Flickr reveals a startling presidential penchant for meticulous editing:
Ouch! The speechwriter who endured this grueling feedback, Jon Favreau, is the second-youngest in presidential history. The only man every to serve at a more tender age, Atlantic magazine writer and former Jimmy Carter speechwriter James Fallows, offered these comments on the photo:
The volume of Obama’s editing is unusual but not unheard of. The quality of his editing is exceptional for a public figure. Think of just one sentence in the shot above. The original says “This has always been our history.” Obama changes it to, “This has always been the history of our progress.” A different, more interesting, and more original-sounding thought.
Those wishing to track President Obama’s edits in detail can view an enormous version of the photo here.
An Indonesian interviews the US President
When is the last time the U.S. had a president like this? Never, that’s when.
Putra Nababan is an interviewer for Seputar Indonesia (English: Around Indonesia), Indonesia’s most-watched newscast. On Monday, he interviewed Barack Obama. From age six to 10, Obama lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, the home of his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro.
Insurance stocks soar as “reform” bill nears passage
Speaking of Glenn Greenwald, the Salon.com columnist has a fact-filled column eviscerating Barack Obama’s claim that Senate Democrats are “standing up to the special interests” opposed to American health care reform.
Greenwald catalogs the explosion in health insurance company stock prices as the severely watered-down reform bill edges toward passage. By way of illustration, he notes that Susan Bayh, wife of Indiana Democratic Senator Evan Bayh and board member of the Indianapolis-based insurance giant WellPoint, has seen the value of her stock in the company rise between $125,000 and $250,000 since her husband helped defeat the bill’s already lame public option.
Although Greenwald considers the bill, which will force Americans to pay private insurance premiums under penalty of income tax penalties, a massive public subsidy of the insurance industry, he supports its passage as a lesser evil than the current health care void. But he is troubled by the vilification of liberals who oppose the bill by the Obama administration and its friends in the media and the blogosphere. Well worth a read.
Fired up? Ready to go? Sure… after a little coaching.
Remember Barack Obama’s “fired up, ready to go” campaign story? About a tiny Greenwood, South Carolina, city councilor named Edith Childs who saved a sparsely attended, early Obama rally with her rhythmic cheerleading? It became one of Obama’s most effective set pieces, almost on a par with, “Yes we can!”
Well, it turns out the story didn’t trip lightly off the President-to-be’s tongue the first few times he told it. In the clip below, an outtake from a documentary on the Obama campaign broadcast tonight on HBO, Obama aides coach him on how to tell the story more effectively.
Hat tip: Politico.
Annals of US torture – updated
According to the website Raw Story, the Obama administration has reacted the the UK High Court decision (stayed pending appeal) to publish details of the torture inflicted on former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed, and Obamaphiles will thre response hard to stomach:
Meanwhile, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said: “We are not pleased”, adding that Washington kept such information confidential “to protect our own citizens.”
How exactly does it protect US citizens to be shielded from the information that CIA agents used scalpels on an illegally rendered prisoner’s testicles? Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald continues to follow this story.
A Contrarian reader points to this account of the freshly minted Nobel laureate’s unwillingness abandon Bush administration practices at Guantanamo.
Obama’s first bad speech?
James Fallows, author, Atlantic Magazine writer, and erstwhile speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, has cataloged with discernment his admiration for several of President Obama’s landmark speeches over the last 18 months. So it was surprising to read his prediction that the president’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize will flop.
Fallow’s argument is “probabilistic:” Of the hundreds of Nobel prize acceptance speeches delivered over the years, he contends, only one was ever noteworthy: the three-minute oration by novelist William Faulkner, a man notorious for hating to make speeches.
Here is Faulkner’s remarkable address, delivered on December 10, 1950:
The full text is after the jump:
