Popular Music Project director and USC Annenberg Professor Josh Kun takes the stage later this month for an inspirational conversation with Golden Globe-nominated Eva Longoria .
Eva will share insights about her journey to Hollywood and her evolution into a Latino community advocate and philanthropist.
Her goal is to motivate USC students and alumni alike to become engaged citizens and to continue striving for their American Dream.
The idea of a "global jukebox" existed long before Spotify or Pandora or even the Internet itself. First envisioned by legendary folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who spent decades making field recordings of traditional music all over the world, the idea has now come full circle as his vast archive of audio, film and video recordings are being digitized so his work can freely stream on the Web. more>>
One of the breakout directors of this year's Sundance Film Festival is...an algorithm. In the experimental project whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, co-creator Eve Sussman uses a computer program to randomly assemble a unique movie for each screening from 3,000 video clips, 80 voiceovers and 150 pieces of music. more>>
You know about "open source." What about "open science?" Leading scientists are pushing for a more collaborative, networked, online and even social media-driven model for sharing information, research and publications.Watchdistinguished scholars discuss the merits of this movement at our 2011 Creativity & Collaboration in the Academy conference.
Is the "best thing happening in pop culture right now" also the best thing for America? Read this and decide.
The old joke "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" "Practice!" still applies as another internet revolution takes hold: on-line music lessons.
Find out which Supreme Court justice said about the FCC's broadcast decency standards, "The way that this policy seems to work, it's like nobody can use dirty words or nudity except for Steven Spielberg." more>>
Finding #1 of USC Center for the Digital Future's 10-year report? Social media is HUGE but most of its content is unreliable. more>>
Can an iPhone improve the quality of life in your city? In Los Angeles it can. The LA County Department of Public Works now offers "The Works," an app that offers a point-and-shoot solution for reporting potholes, graffiti, illegal dumping and other civic annoyances. more>>
Think pop culture is trivial? Try telling that to President Hu Jintao of China. "The international culture of the West is strong while we are weak," he claimed in a recent essay. more>>
How are all those 2011 movie sequels like another helping of holiday mashed potatoes? Marty Kaplan explains.
All Singing! All Dancing! All Protesting! Music and dance now inform and inspire the ongoing Syrian uprising. more>>
British scientists have developed an equation for predicting hit songs. If only it could predict how long Justin Bieber's career will last. more>>
Watch a quick graphic history of the evolution of Western dance music. You'll learn everything you need to know in 20 seconds.
Two Hollywood stars do an "in game" trailer for first-person shooter Modern Warfare 3. They probably wish they were actually in the game. MW3 brought in $400 million in sales in its first 24 hours. It's now past the $1 billion mark. more>>
Bye-bye printed books? Not so fast, says tech blogger Clive Thompson. Think print-on-demand books. more>>
Here's a fun new use for your smart phone: documenting election fraud. more>>
Hold onto your Akhnaten, Twitter triumphs at the opera house -- but only in special "tweet seats." more>>
There's still one thing Hollywood does best and that can't be pirated: theme parks. The Chinese have hired a Burbank company to help build a kung-fu theme park. more>>
Ready for the BIG ONE? Probably not. Read LA WEEKLY's horrifying tale of what could happen. Then check out the Lear Center's analysis of the first LA Shakeout. Then drop, cover and hold!
Beauty and the Bluetooth: You owe more than you know to a drop-dead gorgeous star of Hollywood's golden era. more>>
Don't laugh: a new book explores the cognitive origins of humor. more>>
Bliss indeed: iPhone app lets users control "Bliss Dance," a 40-foot sculpture of a dancing woman. more>>
Professor Wagstaff would be proud. Next year, USC will offer academic courses to train students how to create screen comedy. more>>
THE CENTER
Josh Kun: Musical Conversation with La Santa Cecilia
A SPECIAL PACIFIC STANDARD TIME: ART IN L.A. 1945 - 1980 EVENT
At the Fowler Musuem at UCLA
Presented by the GRAMMY Museum and Fowler Museum
GRAMMY-nominated La Santa Cecilia -- fronted by belter La Marisoul -- draws inspiration from a hybrid of Latin culture, rock and world music, in passionate performances that mesmerize audiences. After a pre-concert interview moderated by Josh Kun, curator of the PST/GRAMMY Museum exhibition Trouble in Paradise: Music and Los Angeles 1945-75 and director of the Lear Center's Popular Music Project, La Santa Cecilia will take audience questions and will perform a selection of songs.
Saturday, February 4, 2012, 7:00pm
$10 for Fowler/GRAMMY Museum Members and students; $15 general admission.
Tickets go on sale January 6th at noon: (213) 765-6803.
Trouble In Paradise: Music and Los Angeles, 1945-1975
The exhibit explores thirty years of the pop music scene in Los Angeles, and its related culture, politics, and popular art.
"This is such a crucial, formative period in the history of music in Los Angeles," says Kun. "It's also a period of great social and cultural transformations, from the building of the freeways to multiple civil rights uprisings. We hope to use this exhibit to highlight music's role in shaping the city's post-World War II identity."
Genres of music highlighted in the exhibit include surf rock, jazz, R&B, Laurel Canyon folk rock, the Sunset Strip rock scene and the East L.A. Chicano sound, all of which helped shape the most diverse and influential music scenes in all of America during this socially tumultuous period of L.A. History.
February 22 - March 25
The GRAMMY Museum
800 West Olympic Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Given the staggering changes that we will inevitably see as a result of new and evolving technologies, no one can be truly ready for the future. For the last 30 years the University of Rhode Island Honors Colloquium has brought together futurists and visionary thinkers to grapple with the astonishing technological advances they foresee and their impact on humankind. In November 2011, the Lear Center's Johanna Blakley joined fellow TED speaker Deb Roy to discuss the intersection of traditional media and social networking. Watch the video here.
November 8, 2011:: University of Rhode Island
For more information on the event, visit the event website.
Web 1, Hollywood 0 in SOPA Fight
Lear Center director Marty Kaplan weighs in on the SOPA internet piracy bill and the Web-wide protest against it in the LA Times as well as on KPCC's The Marilyn Brand Show. And the Writers Guild of America, West, one of the few organizations in Hollywood to oppose SOPA, released this position paperon its objections to the scope and legal vagaries of the proposed bill.
A partnership of the Lear Center, USC Annenberg's Center for Communication Leadership & Policy, and the American Historical Association's National History Center, Getting It Right begins with the premise that both professions, historians and journalists, are in the business of finding and assessing evidence, of analyzing events and of narrating events. Both are storytellers. Both could enhance their work by learning from each other, by establishing networks that connect them, by sharing expertise and by sharing practical knowledge about media and methods.
In order to explore what these professions have in common and where they differ, to begin to understand what each of these professions mean by "getting it right," to examine the impact of journalism on history and of history on journalism, we began at AHA with four case studies: American Biography and the Cold War; Publishing in the American Century; Interpreting the Arab Spring; American Intervention.
Lear Center Director Marty Kaplan moderated the panel on publishing, with Alan Brinkley (Columbia University; author of an acclaimed Henry Luce biography) presenting, joined by panelists Michael Kazin (Georgetown University), T.J. Jackson Lears (Rutgers University-New Brunswick) and Rick Perlstein, (freelance journalist and historian). Coming soon: C-Span video. Listen to audio of the panel now.
Adam Amel Rogers
Adam Amel Rogers is a Project Specialist at the Norman Lear Center.
To this die-hard Denver Broncos fan, the past football season has been an unforgettable wild ride. My beloved team used a series of unbelievable last-minute comebacks to rise above their talent level and win their division and a game in the playoffs. In the process, Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow rose to a level of fame that reaches far beyond the football field.
Few public figures exemplify the work we do at the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center more than Tim Tebow. The Lear Center studies and shapes how entertainment and media impact society; and over the past year, the Tebow phenomenon has traversed numerous societal categories that help explain his meteoric rise in both popularity and disdain.
Religion - The intersection of sports and religion is nothing new, but Tim Tebow has dramatically moved the needle on the public discussion of religion's role in sports. Tebow's overt and unapologetic religious references have made him a hero in evangelical communities and a villain among those who believe in the separation of church and sports. Religion became a regular topic on sports talk radio, and a recent poll revealed that 43% of people believe that "divine intervention" is at least in part responsible for Tebow's success. Following the Broncos legendary overtime playoff win over the Pittsburgh Steelers, a common media meme was focused on how Tebow threw for 316 yards (like the commonly cited Bible verse "John 3:16"), on 10 (as in commandments) passes, for an average of 31.6 yards per pass (there it is again). Some took it even further, noting that he threw the pass to Demaryius Thomas, who shares a birthday with Jesus (December 25). Hyperbolic religious claims and criticisms became a regular part of discussions involving Tebow.
Politics - Tim Tebow has been perhaps the most sought-after celebrity endorsement of the 2012 presidential race. Although he has very smartly
This is the disclaimer that Britain's Public Interest Research Centre recently proposed for inclusion on billboards:
"This advertisement may influence you in ways of which you are not consciously aware. Buying consumer goods is unlikely to improve your wellbeing, and borrowing to buy consumer goods may be unwise; debt can enslave."
For this buy-buy-buy holiday season, those words are a spritz of pepper spray.
Imagine, then, that advertisers were required to admit that the underlying premise of consumerism - Buy this, and you'll be happy, beautiful, desirable and immortal! - is a con. Imagine that they were also compelled to meta-confess that the craft they ply is actually black magic: Beware! This ad will end-run your reason and hijack your judgment.
It's not as farfetched as it seems. After all, tobacco companies have to put this-will-kill-you warnings on cigarette packs. Drug ads are obliged to tell you that their wonder pills may cause hallucinations, impotence, falling asleep during eating, nightmares, compulsive gambling and thoughts of suicide. The sheer length of time it takes to list side effects - often longer than the pitches themselves - is a tacit acknowledgement that something about these ads is nuts. Why shouldn't all ads be ordered to give up the game?
By the time of the 2012 elections, some $3 billion of campaign commercials will have run on TV. It'd be a new day for democracy if political ads were required to include a disclaimer: "The scary music, PhotoShopped pictures and misleading sound bites in this ad are tricks intended to manipulate you in ways of which you are not consciously aware. Voting for this candidate is unlikely to improve how awful things are; hope can heartbreak."Maybe on some other planet that will happen, but not this one. In the absence of consumer warnings on political ads, we have five things to pin our hopes on.
Education: Critical thinking and media literacy - understanding the history and methods of propaganda - are part of the school curriculum. An educated citizen can't be fooled by meretricious bull.
Freedom of speech: The best cure for bad speech is more speech. If ads lie, they can be countered by other ads that correct them. The robust free market of ideas will ensure that truth prevails.
Transparency: Candidates must appear in their ads and say, "I approved this message." The sources of funding for ads to elect or defeat candidates are required to be disclosed.
Social media: Citizens have been empowered by the Internet. Everyone with a laptop can now be a publisher and broadcaster. You don't need a paycheck from a news organization to investigate claims and report abuses.
Just in case you haven't noticed, Brazil is really hot right now. With its incandescent economy and its reputation for sensuality and Mardi Gras decadence, Rio de Janeiro, in particular, has attracted an unprecedented amount of global attention. As the sprawling city prepares for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, all eyes have turned to Rio to better understand how it ticks and how it might brace itself for the world stage.
When the Lear Center's Johanna Blakley was interviewed recently by Ronaldo Lemos for Brazilian MTV, he mentioned a new report that his research institute had issued about the growing Rio fashion industry. The Lear Center has long monitored the global fashion industry, its rather surprising lack of copyright protection and its relationship to media and entertainment. Territórios da Moda (Fashion Territories) is currently only available in Portuguese so, Johanna asked Ronaldo and the project's leader Pedro Augusto Pereira Francisco if they would answer some questions about their findings. They generously agreed and so this is Part One of a two-part interview about the inner workings of Rio's booming fashion scene.
Johanna: I think most people are familiar with the bright colors and body-conscious style that's typical of fashion in Rio, but you mention in your report a certain "hi-lo blasé" that defines the carioca lifestyle. Could you tell me a little more about that?
Ronaldo & Pedro: Sure, in our research we have identified three important segments in the Rio fashion industry. We have called them "fashion", "off-fashion", and the "atelier" circuits. The fashion circuit is the higher-end designers, the off-fashion is the incredible industry that developed in the outskirts of Rio, far from the posh neighborhoods. They are an important economic force, and have become also a creative force. And the ateliers are small-business, producing very exclusive pieces, and doing sometimes conceptual work, in a small scale. There is a lot of diversity in these segments, but they are all influenced to some extent by the image of Rio de Janeiro, that is, a casual-chic mixture, where flip-flops can be mixed with a very well-designed dress, and the combination ends up being a very sophisticated look.
Johanna: You indicate in the report that higher-end designers are less concerned with being copied than with being accused of copying, or getting caught on the back-end of a passing trend. In fact, I think one designer you interviewed said that they need to "escape trends" in order to remain relevant in the marketplace. Could you talk a little more about that?
Ronaldo & Pedro: Absolutely. The "fashion" segment is a fairly recent phenomenon in Brazil. The Rio de Janeiro fashion week (as well as Sao Paulo's) only really took off in the last 12 years. So it is natural that designers find it important to establish their own identities and make a point that they are not simply copying the trends they saw in the previous shows in New York, London, Paris or Milan. In this sense, it is important to mention that seasons in Brazil are the opposite of what they are in the US and Europe. With that comes the temptation to simply copy the trends presented in the last seasons in the US and Europe. But the movement now is to establish a local identity, to strengthen the local brands and their ideas. There has been quite a lot of consolidation in the market in Brazil, and many local brands have been acquired by investment groups.
When I think about mash-ups, I can't help but think about Julia Kristeva and her notion of intertextuality.
The term has been used in many, many different ways since she first coined it, but, quite generally, she was using it to talk about literature and the way that it exists within not only a network of language but a network of texts. Every text, even something you wrote on a sticky note, is in dialogue with the entire linguistic system - you've just selected a few words from that system. Those words, of course, are weighted with meaning: they have a long history of being used by lots of other people, for lots of different purposes - both constructive and nefarious.
Now a literary text - something that's trying to assert or achieve the status of a cultural object that deserves a reader's consideration (something more refined than your sticky note) - is part of a network of language and also a network of previous texts. Kristeva was very interested in how it is that the meaning of a piece of literature is produced in the mind of a reader, who cannot help but situate their understanding of that text in a larger context, one that includes what they've read before and what the writer is both self-consciously and unconsciously referencing.
If you think about it, the process of writing anything could be described as the process of sampling.
Some authors are far more self-conscious about this process than others. I wrote my doctoral dissertation about literary modernism and so I became very familiar with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a poem infamous for its intertextuality. Eliot's literary and historical references were so numerous and so intricately interwoven that he was prevailed upon to provide footnotes for later editions. Nowadays I don't believe you can find an edition without the footnotes, which themselves have become the subject of detailed literary analysis. Even though I was a big fan of Public Enemy at the time, it didn't occur to me that what Eliot was doing in his "high modernist" masterpiece was not all that different from what hip-hop artists were doing with recorded samples - creating multilayered, multivalent texts that engage with the past as they try to grapple with the present. (You can find out a bit more about my continuing research on The Waste Land here)
Occupy Protesters: Lay Claim to the New Top-Level Domains for Cities!
David Bollier
David Bollier is a Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center.
As the Occupy Wall Street protesters contemplate "what next?" - and as they ponder how to combine a visionary agenda with achieveable, short-term political goals - I have a suggestion. The Occupy forces in hundreds of cities should petition their local governments to acquire a new "top-level Internet domain" for their city, and to manage that patch of cyberspace as a local commons.
Even Internet sophisticates are not really tracking this issue, but the ownership and control of the new city TLDs could provide enormous new opportunities for citizens to transform their local political cultures, economies and everyday life.
Top-level domains, or TLDs, are the suffixes at the end of Internet addresses, as in .com, .org and .edu. The international body that manages TLDs is called ICANN, for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It recently approved a plan that will authorize cities to acquire their own TLDs, as in .nyc, .paris and .berlin. If properly constituted, the city TLDs could serve as "open greenfields for new local governance structures." Unfortunately, the new city TLDs are not likely to serve this role if traditional city governments simply sell off the TLDs to private interests. Transformative governance will occur only if the TLDs are managed as digital commons accountable to city residents. (See my previous blog on this topic.)
We've seen how opportunities to use public assets can be squandered through the kind of backdoor privatization that city governments love to promote (the famous "public/private partnerships"). Just look at Zucotti Park itself, a "privately owned public space" that is mostly controlled by its private owner, and only indirectly by the city - and hardly at all by New Yorkers except through their extraordinary "occupation" of the site. (More on "privately owned public spaces" here.)
Why is it important that the commoners lay claim to the new city TLDs? Because they would assure that local citizens could more readily communicate with each other, participate in their self-governance locally, and help design and transform the physical and social dimensions of their city. The city TLDs could help citizens reclaim their own cities.
I'm certainly not the first to point out the similarities between haute couture - rarefied apparel that no normal person would have an occasion to wear - and haute cuisine - exquisitely prepared food that costs a fortune and simply disappears by evening's end. This last July, the French Ministry of Culture sponsored a posh event at the Palais Royale that celebrated two of France's most respected exports: in justifying the dual focus, organizers argued that
Though the raw materials may be different, artisans in both trades must master techniques, a "savoir-faire" and possess a vision to reach the height of their craft . . .
But most foodies and fashionistas don't realize that there's an even more elemental connection between cuisine and fashion: neither have a great deal of copyright protection.
In Lear Center research on the role that copyright plays in the fashion industry, I came across a few articles mentioning the similarity between recipes - which cannot be copyrighted - and fashion designs, which don't qualify either. I thought it was fascinating that such creative industries managed to innovate and stay fresh even though fashion designers and chefs have no control over the appropriation of their work by others. The same cannot be said of painters, sculptors, photographers, graphic designers, musicians or writers.
So, as a foodie and a fashion lover, I was delighted to be invited to a unique conference in Barcelona, co-sponsored by Telefónica, Spain's most prominent telecommunications company, and the El Bulli Foundation, Ferran Adrià's effort to perform cutting edge research about food and innovation. Gastronomy & Technology Days (check out the Twitter hashtag >#gastrotechdays) brought together an incredibly diverse international group of writers, researchers, software engineers and hard-core food bloggers to discuss the intersection of food and technology.
Popular Music Project director and USC Annenberg Professor Josh Kun takes the stage later this month for an inspirational conversation with Golden Globe-nominated Eva Longoria .
Beauty and the Bluetooth: You owe more than you know to a drop-dead gorgeous star of Hollywood's golden era. 
Professor Wagstaff would be proud. Next year, USC will offer academic courses to train students how to create screen comedy. 
A SPECIAL PACIFIC STANDARD TIME: ART IN L.A. 1945 - 1980 EVENT 
The GRAMMY Museum, in conjunction with the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945 - 1980, will unveil its latest special exhibit, 
A new study by 
Lear Center director 
To this die-hard Denver Broncos fan, the past football season has been an unforgettable wild ride. My beloved team used a series of unbelievable last-minute comebacks to rise above their talent level and win their division and a game in the playoffs. In the process, Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow rose to a level of fame that reaches far beyond the football field. 
This is the disclaimer that Britain's Public Interest Research Centre recently 
As the Occupy Wall Street protesters contemplate "what next?" - and as they ponder how to combine a visionary agenda with achieveable, short-term political goals - I have a suggestion. The Occupy forces in hundreds of cities should petition their local governments to acquire a new "top-level Internet domain" for their city, and to manage that patch of cyberspace as a local commons.
In Lear Center research on the role that copyright plays in the fashion industry, I came across a few articles mentioning the similarity between recipes - which cannot be copyrighted - and fashion designs, which don't qualify either. I thought it was fascinating that such creative industries managed to innovate and stay fresh even though fashion designers and chefs have no control over the appropriation of their work by others. The same cannot be said of painters, sculptors, photographers, graphic designers, musicians or writers.
