Popular Culture

One of my students recently brought to my attention three television advertisements that have the dubious distinction of having earned "The Rudyard Kipling Prize for the Year's Most Racist TV Spot." The prize is awarded by New York University's Department of Culture and Communication in its annual takeoff on the ad industry's Clio Awards. The winning ads are all part of a campaign by Fox Sports that makes fun of "foreign" customs to attract viewers to the Fox network.

In September 1945, under a pall of ocher smog and summer heat, Los Angeles entered the postwar world. The city then was bigger, wealthier and more diverse than ever. Its established people — mostly past middle age and conservative, a few who were really rich — still had the narrowness of the Midwest towns from which many of them had come in the 1920s. The city's new people — Okies and Arkies, black Southerners, and white ethnics — had arrived with the war. Few of them had much interest in art. Of course, there was art in Los Angeles they could have seen.

Like a hunter circling around its prey only to somehow let it escape, the panel discussion on "Popular Culture: Rage, Rights and Responsibilities" (at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28) keeps losing a grip on the slippery subject of artistic license and social responsibility. Introduced by Fred Friendly and moderated with lawyerly skill by Charles R.

You may not have seen "Idiocracy," the 2006 sci-fi comedy set in an utterly dysfunctional nation 500 years in the future, but chances are you've heard it mentioned lately. References to the film seem to be everywhere, and not just in op-eds penned by cranky columnists (I mentioned it in a column last year about public spaces being sold as advertising space). The latest issue of the Economist has an article about the business-sabotaging effects of the battles in Washington, headlined "American Idiocracy.

On the eve of 2001, Calendar brought together three pairs of high-profile creators and administrators from disparate parts of the entertainment and arts world to candidly discuss issues of the day. In this first installment, "Law & Order" creator Dick Wolf sat down with Grammy-winning record producer Rick Rubin to reflect on a year's worth of controversy over content that stretched from Hollywood to Capitol Hill. Are artists' rights in danger?

At a time of unprecedented media power and influence, Euro-American performing artists are taking a hard look at the sham, the con, the poison in popular entertainment. Exactly a month after the Pina Bausch company danced "Nelken" (Carnations) at UCLA, along comes Susan Marshall with "The Descent Beckons," another satire of pop culture reflecting the same dismay over that culture's lust for violence.

Jimmy had two parents, but they didn't seem to matter to him as much as his friends. Since grade school, kids had been coming over and disappearing into his room, where they would listen to CDs, play video games or read comic books. Now at 13, he was smoking pot and planning to pierce his ear, eyebrow and lip. To Ron Taffel, the New York psychotherapist brought in to counsel the family, Jimmy was typical of today's troubled teens.

The nominations are in for 2002, and it's time to announce America's newest cultural hot spot. New York? Not this time, paisano. How about Austin? Chapel Hill? San Jose? Nope, none of those gleaming New Economy towns. The winner, believe it or not, is Detroit, one of the scrappiest, most soulful burgs in the nation -- as well as one of the most complex and misrepresented. Detroit, a.k.a. Hockeytown, where the fans at Joe Louis Arena are as tough as the players slamming each other out on the ice.

Ray Browne, 87, a professor at Ohio's Bowling Green University who was widely credited with coining the term "popular culture" and pioneering the study of such things as bumper stickers and cartoons, died Thursday at his home, his family said. The cause was congestive heart failure. Browne wrote and edited more than 70 books on popular culture -- including "The Guide to United States Popular Culture," published in 2001. Although many in the field credit Browne with coming up with the name "popular culture," no one could say for sure whether he originated it. "He was really going against the grain," said Robert Thompson, director of the Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

The happy Mammy, the grinning Coon, the wide-eyed Pickaninny, the savage Brute, the faithful Uncle Tom and the carefree Sambo are cruel black stereotypes that have finally disappeared from America's cultural mainstream.

On Wednesday, the final episode of Oprah Winfrey's long-running TV talk show will air. In the 25 years since the show has been nationally syndicated, Winfrey — or, really, Oprah, since that is how she is globally known — has made herself a singular force in television and the popular culture. In that period, she has topped the daytime ratings as talk show host, earned an Oscar nomination for her acting, become a producer, launched her own magazine (which features her on the cover each month)

As "The Oprah Winfrey Show" draws to a much publicized end this month one thing is clear: Al Gore may or may not have invented the Internet, Mark Zuckerberg may or may not have invented Facebook, but Oprah Winfrey most certainly did invent social media. Like early competitor Phil Donahue, Oprah closed the geographic gap between audience and host from the moment she took over "AM Chicago" in 1984. Her decision to walk among the audience made it clear that she was neither authority figure interviewer nor a celebrity host.

Bill Blackbeard, an early scholar of newspaper comics who created an indispensable archive in San Francisco that helped legitimize the study of comics in popular culture, has died. He was 84. Blackbeard died at a Country Villa nursing home in Watsonville, Calif. His March 10 death, confirmed by Social Security records became public only in late April when news of it circulated on websites devoted to comics. "It's not an understatement to say that the entire movement of looking at comics as American history and culture would be fundamentally different without Bill and his contributions," said Andrew Farago of the Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco.

Surely you noticed this urgent news item over the weekend: The red swimsuit worn by Farrah Fawcett in her iconic 1976 poster has been donated to the Smithsonian's popular culture history collection. Along for the ride were some of Fawcett's "Charlie's Angels" scripts, a Fawcett doll, a hairstyling kit called Farrah's Glamour Center and, of course, the poster itself. Do such artifacts belong at the Smithsonian? That's the question, all right; but seeing the famous photograph has a way of making you forget, for a moment, to ask it. It's pure, perfect 1976.

With a multimillion-dollar investment, Lakers Hall of Famer Magic Johnson is set to become chairman of a New York-based magazine and television company that he says is poised to tap into a coveted urban audience. Johnson, 51, will be chairman of Vibe Holdings, the parent company of Vibe magazine and owner of the music-and-dance TV show "Soul Train," including its star-studded performance library. No financial details of the deal were disclosed, although a Johnson spokeswoman described it as "an eight-figure investment.

Woody Allen's 41st feature, "Midnight in Paris," starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy (wife of the French president), will open the Cannes Film Festival on May 11, organizers announced Wednesday. But if you're not in Cannes that night, you still might be able to catch the romantic comedy ? it's to be released in some 400 theaters across France on the same day. "'Midnight in Paris' is a wonderful love letter to Paris," festival director Thierry Frémaux said in a statement.

Hal Riney, a legendary San Francisco advertising executive whose best-known work included campaigns for Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers, Saturn cars and the 1984 reelection of President Reagan, has died. He was 75. Riney died of cancer Monday at his home in San Francisco, said Michelle Musburger, a spokeswoman for his former San Francisco ad agency, Publicis & Hal Riney.

The first time I ever thought about life imitating art was in a German literature class in college. We were reading Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther," kind of an 18th-Century version of the 20th-Century movie hit, "Fatal Attraction." The story's hero, Werther--who dresses in a trademark blue waistcoat and yellow vest--falls in love with a woman who already has been promised to another man she doesn't love. Werther pines for her and longs for her, but in vain.

What is a ghost? A disembodied spirit or just the product of a troubled mind? Does it matter? It does for paranormal investigators, whether they're William James and the American Society of Psychical Research or the team on Syfy Channel's "Ghosthunters. " Ghostly phenomena have to be measurable to be taken seriously ? a hallucination just won't cut it. Investigators devote their lives to finding "reliable" data. (For an entertaining recent view on all this, check out Gregory Lewis' post "Why I Don't Believe in Ghosts" on searchwarp.

The curtain that shrouds North Korean culture and daily life opened briefly this week with reports that state television in Pyongyang had broadcast the British soccer film "Bend It Like Beckham. " In one of the world's most reclusive nations, Western movies and TV fare are largely verboten, especially a film that deals with such racy subject matters as intercultural relationships, homosexuality and religion. But censors took care of that: The 2002 movie starring Parminder Nagra and Keira Knightley as young soccer players and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as their coach was edited down to one hour, leaving little more than scenes of a sport that is beloved to most North Koreans.