Since 1985, in various formats, SLANT -- an independent voice based in Richmond's Fan District -- has offered its readers original commentary on politics and popular culture, including cartoons and selected sundries. Warning: Sometimes that means satirical content. All rights are reserved.
This music and interview recording was made in 1973 at Alpha Audio. It was created to play on WGOE's AM airwaves. The featured artist is Bruce Springsteen. This is after Steel Mill but before the E Street Band.While the movie’s history is woefully twisted, since its release in 1915 "The Birth of a Nation," directed by D.W. Griffith, has evolved into an important historical document itself. It was America‘s first widely distributed feature length motion picture. Sadly, in its initial release many viewers swallowed its glorification of the KKK as genuine history. Now it stands as powerful evidence of how utterly determined some people were at that time to avert their eyes from the truth.Click here to read my latest effort at Richmond.com, "Fresh Looks at Familiar History."
George Allen (depicted in 2006 by yours truly) is back on the campaign trail. He wants Virginia's voters to return him to his old job in the U.S. Senate. Well, some Republicans in Virginia may be glad about Allen's announcement, which hardly came as a surprise to the Old Dominion's political blogosphere.Friends, it’s time for an American comeback. A comeback with leaders in Washington who listen to We The People, adhere to foundational principles, rein in spending and start creating opportunities for more jobs.Other Republicans may remember his 2006 campaign and wonder who has been advising Mr. Allen that most conservative Virginians relish the idea of supporting him in 2012. Before the infamous Macaca Meltdown in 2006, while eying a run for the White House down the road, wasn't Allen the guy who said the Senate was too slow moving, even boring?
Now to get [sic] we’re going to need more leaders listening to Virginia voices. Leaders who will fight to Repeal and replace this government mandated healthcare experiment, Pass a balanced budget amendment and the line-item veto, And reduce our families’ energy costs by unleashing our American resources and creativity.
Today I’m announcing my candidacy for the U.S. Senate. You know me...
Shelley Rolfe’s
By the Way
Richmond Times-Dispatch (April, 16, 1973)
It was breakfast time and the high command for Discover the Fan Day had, with proper regard for the inner man, moved its final planning meeting from the Biograph Theater to Lum’s Restaurant. Breakfast tastes ran a gamut. Eggs with beer. Eggs with orange juice. H-hour -- the operations plan had set it for noon -- was less than three hours away. Neither beer nor orange juice was being gulped nervously.
Terry Rea, manager of the Biograph and the extravaganza’s impresario, was reciting a last-minute, mental things-to-do list. There was the vigilante committee, which would gather up the beer and soft drink cans and bottles that invariably infest the fronts of the shops in the 800 and 900 blocks of W. Grace St., focus area of the discovery.
The city police had promised a dragnet to sweep away the winos who also invariably litter the neighborhood. The day had bloomed crisp and sunny, the first dry Saturday since Groundhog Day. “I knew it wouldn’t rain,” Rea said with the brash confidence of the young. “Lots of young businessmen around here,” a beer drinker at another table said. The free enterprise system lives.
REA WAS assigning duties for the committee that would rope off two Virginia Commonwealth University parking lots that would serve as the setting for a fashion show and band concert. The committee to blow up balloons, with the aid of a cylinder of helium [sic]. One thousand balloons in a shrieking variety of colors. “If we only get 500 kids... two to a customer,” Rea said cheerfully.
“I need more people,” said the balloon task force leader.
Twenty-one businesses were involved in the project. Each of them had contributed prizes, and gift certificates had been put into plastic Easter eggs. An egg hunt would be part of the day, and Rea had a message for the committee that would be tucking the eggs away: “Don’t put them in obvious places, but don’t put them were people can get hurt looking for them.”
“We talked about doing this last summer but we never got it together,” Rea said. There had been fresh talk in late February, early March, and it had become airborne. The 21 businesses had anted up $1,500 for advertising, which was handled by Dave DeWitt, proprietor of a new just-out-of-the-Fan, small, idea-oriented agency.
“Demographically, we were aiming for people between 25 and 34,” Rea said. There had been newspaper advertising and spots on youth-oriented radio stations. “We had a surplus late in the week...” Rea said. The decision was made to have a Saturday morning splurge on radio station WRVA. “Hey,” said a late arrival, “I heard Alden Aaroe talking about it.”
“We wanted people to see what we have here,” Rea said. “People who probably close their windows and lock their doors when they drive on Grace Street and want to get through here as quickly as possible.”
Well, yes, there must be those who look upon the 800 and 900 blocks as symbolic of the counterculture, as territory alien to their visions of West End and suburban existence. Last November the precinct serving the 800 and 900 blocks went for George McGovern, by two votes. Not a landslide, but, perhaps, a trend.
NOON WAS approaching. Rea and DeWitt set out on an inspection tour. Parking lot ropes were being put into place. Rock music blared from exotically named shops. The balloon committee was still short on manpower. An agent trotted out of a shop to report, “They’ve got 200 customers ...” And how many would they normally have at this hour of a Saturday” “They wouldn’t be open,” Rea said.
Grace Street was becoming clogged with cars It would become more clogged. Don’t know how many drivers got out of their cars, but, for a while they were a captive audience making at least vicarious discovery.
Also much pedestrian and bicycle on the sidewalks. Merchants talked of espying strangers, of all ages. A white-haired woman held a prize egg in one hand, a balloon in the other. A middle-aged man had rakishly attached a balloon to the bill of his cap.
The fashion show went on to the accompaniment of semijazz music and popping balloons, most of them held by children. Fashions were subdued. A dress evocative of the 1840s. Long skirts. Loudest applause went to a man who paraded across the stage wearing a loud red backpack. Everybody’s urge to escape?
ON GRACE STREET a sword swallower and human pin cushion was on exhibition. No names please. “My mother ...” he said. He wished to be identified only as a member of “Bunkie Brothers Medicine Show.”
Discounted merchandise on sale included 20-yesr-old British Army greatcoats and a book fetchingly titled “Sensuous Massage.” Sales resistance remained firm.
On Harrison Street a sidewalk artist was creating. A wino, who had somehow escaped the dragnet, lurched across the sidewalk art muttering. “Free balloons ...” In a shop a man said, “I want the skimpiest halter you have ... for my wife.”
On an alley paralleling Grace Street, a man holding a hand camera and early on a VCU class assignment was directing actors. One stationed in a huge trash bin. “Waiting for Godot” revisited? The second, carrying a an umbrella in one hand, popcorn in another, approached the bin. A hand darted out for popcorn. “I ran out of film!” screamed the director.
Everything was being done again. The actor in the bin emerged, seized the umbrella and ran. “Chase him,” from the direct. Actor No. 2 did a Keystone Kop-style double take, jumped and ran. A small crowd that had gathered applauded.
LATE IN the day. Traffic still was at a saturation level. Early settlers said the territory hadn’t seen such congestion since the movie, “Deep Throat.” Rea spoke of objectives smashingly achieved. Euphoric talk from him on another day of discovery in September. City Hall would be petitioned to block off Grace Street.
Blood Isn’t Just Red
by F.T. Rea
Television has dominated the American cultural landscape for the past 50 years. A boon to modern life in many ways, television is nonetheless transmitting an endless stream of cruel and bloody images into everyone’s head.
However, if you’re still waiting for absolute proof that a steady diet of video violence can be harmful to the viewer, forget it. We’ll all be dead before such a thing can be proven. This is a common sense call that can and should be made without benefit of dueling experts. Short of blinding denial, any serious person can see that the influence television has on young minds is among the factors playing a role in the crime statistics.
How significant that role has been/is can be debated.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m as dedicated to protecting freedom of speech as the next guy. So perish the thought that I’m calling for the government to regulate violence on television. It’s not a matter of preventing a particular scene, or act, from being aired. The problem is that the flow of virtual mayhem is constant.
Eventually splattered blood becomes ambient: just another option for the art director.
My angle here is that in the marketplace of ideas, the repeated image has a decided advantage. The significance of repetition in advertising was taught to me over 25 years ago by a man named Lee Jackoway. He was a master salesman, veteran broadcaster, and my boss at WRNL-AM. And, like many in the advertising business, he enjoyed holding court and telling war stories.
He had found me struggling with the writing of some copy for a radio commercial. At the time he asked me a few questions and let it go. But later, in front of a group of salesmen and disc jockeys, Jackoway explained to his audience what I was doing was wrong. Basically, he said that instead of stretching to write good copy, the real effort should be focused on selling the client more time, so the ad spot would get additional exposure.
Essentially, Jackoway told us to forget about trying to be the next Stan Freeberg. Forget about cute copy and far-flung schemes. What matters is results. If you know the target audience and you have the right vehicle to reach it, then all you have to do is saturate that audience. If you hit that target often enough, the results are money in the bank.
Jackoway told us most of the large money spent on production went to satisfying the ego of the client, or to promoting the ad agency’s creativity. While he might have oversimplified the way ad biz works to make his point, my experience with media has brought me to the same bottom line: When all else fails, saturation works.
Take it from me, dear reader, it doesn’t matter how much you think you’re ignoring the commercials that are beamed your way; more often than not repetition bores the message into your head. Ask the average self-absorbed consumer why he chooses a particular motor oil or breakfast cereal, and chances are he’ll claim the thousands of commercials he paid no heed had nothing to do with his choices.
Meanwhile, good old Lee Jackoway knows that same chump is pouring Pennzoil on his Frosted Flakes because he has been influenced by aggressive advertising all day long, every day.
OK, if repetition works so well in television’s advertising, why would repetition fail to sell whatever messages stem from the rest of its fare? When you consider all the murders, all the rapes, all the malevolence that television dishes out 24 hours a day, it adds up. It has to.
What to do?
I have to believe that if the sponsors of the worst, most pointless violent programs felt the sting of a boycott from time to time, they would react. Check your history; boycotts work.
It’s not as though advertisers are intrinsically evil. No, they are merely trying to reach their target audience as cheaply as possible. The company that produces a commercial has no real interest in pickling your child’s brain with violence; it just wants to reach the kid with a promotional message.
If enough consumers eschew worthless programs and stop buying the products that sponsor them, the advertiser will change its strategy. It really is that simple.
As we all know: A day passes whether anything is accomplished or not. Well, parents, a childhood passes, too, whether anything of value is learned or not.
Maybe television is blocking your child off from a lesson that needs to be learned firsthand -- in the real world where blood isn’t just red, it’s wet.
The selling words of advertisements create action all day, every day. Our society runs on ads and other forms of propaganda. So, saying that heated political rhetoric didn't play a part in what drove a crazy man to commit violent crimes, just because no connection can be proven, is absurd.The tragic Arizona shootings that left six dead and others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) critically wounded, have sparked debate over an important question: What's the connection between violent political rhetoric and real violence? It's not a new debate, especially in the South, where the bloody civil rights era forced Southerners and the nation to confront how extremist and violent political messages can have deadly results.To read the entire piece, "Do violent words cause violence?" which is short, timely and worthwhile, click here.
Joseph H. Seipel has been named dean of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, the premier public graduate school of arts and design in the United States, effective March 15.Click here to read the entire story at the Fan District Hub.
However, when El-Amin suggested that racism kept the names of black victims off that memorial plaque in the park, he was ignoring the larger view. El-Amin was willfully averting his eye from the specific history that led to the naming of the bridge.Click here to read this entire story.
...Richmond’s semi-savvy City Council will take bold new steps in its anti-noise campaign. Council will unveil new laws prohibiting the performance of live music after 11 p.m., if you can hear it at all. Likewise, Richmond’s movie theaters will only be allowed to show silent movies after 11 p.m., which should please fans of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone Kops. When it comes to live comedy on stage at venues within the city limits, only mimes will be permitted to perform in public after the noise curfew.Click here to read my predictions for Richmond.com, "2011's Most Predictable Locals."
