State of the Union Media Bias?

With all the specualtion concerning media bias during the 2004 election, I noticed an oddity during the State of the Union address on Feb 2, 2005. During the speech I often swithch channels to see if there are altenative camera angles. Last night I noticed that the Fargo FOX and ABC channels had a louder volumne than the NBC and CBS outlets. While this could be the choice of engineers in Fargo and have nothing to do with media bias, it was curious. THew channel thought more pro-Bush has more volumne than the two considered more anti-Bush.

Phantom Of the Opera is Great

Phantom of the Opera is worth your time. While an old story, this version really grabs you and takes you along. The singing is of top quality. The sets are fantastic. Paris can easily be beautiful, but the fading in and out through time is done with true skill.. The only ding on the surface is that the scenes can seem to jump at times. Why is she standing there when she was in another place the scene before? What is the blonde girl doing at the end? This is minor and of those I went with only once did we agree on this. See it soon.

I'm Back

The web offers so many things to do that as I try them out I keep finding that time runs short to do them all. My blog has been one of those lost souls. A lot has taken place, but expressing myself is one of those things that has to come back. It has been a year under a rock. More to come...

Metropolis

The new DVD version of Metropolis is fantastic. Kino International has taken the bits and pieces that they can find of the original epic length film and produced a remade classic worth a look by everyone. The anti-machine message is so vividly clear. The impact of it all is powerful.

One of the most striking images is that of the animated downtown scene. The artistic quality of the images given the age of the production is glorious. The view of the future is both quaint and visionary. The elevated bridges for earthly travel contrast with the 1920's look of the airplane flying right downtown between the sky scrapers. Even in its visionary view, it does make one think of how the actual form of tomorrow [as with the plane] misses the innovations of modern engineering and art.

The anti-machine message is brought home by the waste of our lives given by God in the endless drudgery of routine work. What are the workers even doing with the clocks as valves that they slave over. The workers openly being sacrificed into the machine is a turning point for the hero. He wants nothing of it. It is horrible, even if his life and his father's benefit to the maximum from it.

Do not miss this great remake of our age. Good in the 1920s; good in 2004.

End of the Season

Football is coming to an end. The Packers lost the most crucial game of the year. I wonder if all the talk about Brett retiring led him to hesitate about winning the game? I will miss it.

Coupling is gone, too. It overloaded the American viewer. With all of the reality junk, you wonder why Coupling would fail.

Coupling: the anti-Dawson's Creek

While the critiics have widely given Coupling an "F", I was amused by its exposure of the widespread shallowness of Americans. It actually seemed like the anti-Dawson's Creek. The Creek had young people talking in terms well beyond the average for their age; that was one of the show's most appealing aspects. It did seem unreal when cast against the language of average people the age of the Dawson's crowd. Coupling travels away from the deep angst of the Creek to the selfish level of most people. The undercurrents or subcontexts were obvious. Coupling is a Sienfeld type of directionless, plotless show where the real purpose is to expose the unfeeling nature of people. Sienfeld really is about four people divorced from their fellow humans and unable to recognize it. This is clearly recognized in the final episode where sitting in the jail celll the four of them just do not get it. Their part in humanity is just invisible to them. Coupling is about the same, except sexual encounters are the whole purpose of life. The goal is to point out that the gang on Coupling is no different from the body- and self-obsessed people of America and television.

The Ten Commandments

The real cost of this whole process of removing Christianity from our public life could be an increasing withdrawl of the Christian community from the American community. In this I look not just to the more active Christian crowd, but the larger silent Christian community.

In larger perspective, the removal of the monument in Alabama is just one tiny piece of a gigantic attack on anything of Western Civilization. As the public culture of the United States separates itself more and more from its past and its roots, what remains may not be something that any one wants to support. We are already viewed by many as a nation of lost sheep. To further cut away our underpinning will only leave Americans looking for more support. Those attacking the roots of our nation may find that they have removed all elements of our past to find that nothing good is there to replace them.

A nation of tolerance is a worthy goal, but can America take tolerating everything at the expense of diminishing what is of value to a majority of its people?