[Cross-posted] Remember Xanadu? It’s become somewhat of a cult hit even though in 1980 it was considered Olivia Newton-John’s mega-turkey. Stylistically, it sits uncomfortably between the 1970s and 1980s, as though there was a vacuum in between the decades. In one scene, Michael Beck insists to Gene Kelly that ‘It’s the ’80s’, but you know that it must have been shot in 1979 and people had not rebelled against disco at the time.
Of course, reality tells us that you can’t mark off decades so clearly: elements of the 1970s necessarily continue into the 1980s, and some of what we regard as 1980s style had their roots in the decade before.
But by 1982 there’s no doubt that one was in the 1980s: Rick Dees poked fun at ‘Disco Duck’ on Solid Gold and even ABBA no longer could do number-one hits.
While there aren’t clear decade-dividers, there is a sense among us, as people, to want to bring new things into each era. Who can forget the sense of optimism we all faced as January 1, 2000 came around, even though it wasn’t technically the new millennium yet? We saw the year number beginning with 2 and it was a big deal. All those science-fiction films predicting a new era in the twenty-first century brought with them a sense of anticipation—and those that didn’t forecast the end of mankind in 1999 suggested that we might be a nicer bunch in the 2000s than we were in human history’s most violent, murderous 100 years.
Here we are in 2008 and not that much has changed. We definitely aren’t nicer; in western countries we might well be more paranoid. But these are, in my reckoning, not twenty-first-century issues. This is leftover business from the twentieth century that we have not sufficiently dealt with, and we still have the opportunity to do something about it. Terrorism and nutty red brigades were with us through much of my childhood but various western democracies thought they could turn their backs on them. Arafat’s PLO came to the fore in the 1970s, not the 1990s. The negative effects of globalization have been with us since the postwar period. As has communism in Red China, which has brought us the censorship that western media are only now, with days to go before the Beijing Olympics, making a song and dance about.
Just as a new decade does not begin to be “felt” till two years in, a new century won’t be felt till, I reckon, its second decade begins.
The twentieth might well have been marked by our arrogance and over-dependence on technology as the Titanic set sail. And as that century dawned, indeed we were bullish about globalization brought about by shipping routes and the British Empire. As the Titanic sank, we were reminded that we could never be over-confident about technology. We might have said a few years before that we had too much to lose from going to war, with the expansion of global trade, but humankind sank into the Great War with new innovations of aeroplanes and machine-guns.
Yet humans remain optimistic as we head into the 2010s. I would say there are more Americans hopeful about Sen. Obama’s race toward the White House than Sen. McCain’s at this stage, regardless of the latter’s attack advertising—because Obama has not defined things well. There is a sense of casting off the twentieth century. You see the same in so many areas as people question the economic system, politics, and how we are exposed to global disasters through the media. You also see questioning of the media. All of this inquisitiveness seems to be happening on a wider scale, maybe sparked off by authors and thinkers writing in the last part of the twentieth century trying to lay some useful groundwork for the rest of us as their ideas got out.
What sort of century is emerging? We would like to think that we can solve all the world’s problems because we are blessed with the ability and desire; yet institutions seem to constantly thwart our collective wills. Various individuals take matters into their own hands, be they international philanthropists setting up funds for poorer countries or bloggers trying to break the mainstream media’s deadlock on what we are allowed to know.
Meanwhile, corporations try to feed consumers products as a substitute for Orwellian soma—not necessities which we should look at having, but unnecessary items that take us away from being true to ourselves.
I don’t have the answers to what sort of century we will face. I know what sort of century I would like to face. One where people from all walks of life can realize their dreams, where people can receive the education they want, and where deceit and avarice are shown to be harmful to the collective good. One where imagination and innovation drive forward human progress, rather than impeded by society or corporations because they view them as threats.
The answer might lie in examining the changes in style between decades. Were they the result of companies dictating fashion or some deeper change in the Zeitgeist, driven by many individuals?
I like to think it was the latter. When the end of 1999 came about, I certainly was not told to head into town to see how crowded or fun Wellington city was. I just went. Something drew me to it.
There is something to be said about people driving the mood of the planet, and how we still have a chance to shape the twenty-first century’s destiny as we cast off the negative effects of the previous one.
We know where we goofed. We have seen it in the destruction of freedom or the greed of certain parties; we have seen it through a failure to understand other cultures or how institutions block aid from getting to the people. We know there must be solutions, and we now have a twentieth-century invention—the internet—where we can band together, make some noise and maybe generate real progress. We just need to wake up, realize what is useless in our lives, what we can do for ourselves and others, and get back to first principles. Technology, for instance, is here to serve us, rather than direct us into buying the next little toy to waste away whatever precious seconds we have each day.
We might define the new century through new energies (hybrid cars are so last century—we can do better), through new ways of reaching people in need (which we are already doing through unprecedented dialogue), and through redefining institutions to turn them into agents of change rather than stiflng collectives of people.
It’s through simplifying our lives and our directions that we can sense what we might want in the twenty-first century. Have a think—and maybe we can just put something out there into that Zeitgeist as this century really begins unfolding.
[Cross-posted] Fouad Alfarhan is a Saudi blogger who has been writing to advocate greater freedom in his country. He was arrested without charge on December 11. Some bloggers have gotten together to deem today (Sunday, January 6) a day of silence, so after this post, we will not blog publicly for 24 hours. Please tell other bloggers if you feel you should, or observe the day’s silence if you wish to join in this campaign.
We have never done much promoting of the Lucire blog, but we are quite happy for blogging networks to syndicate our RSS feed. We’ve noted that the nice folks at StyleInn have started including Lucire: Insider as part of their coverage, as have others, and welcome them. A Feedburner link is at the top right of the screen (the usual RSS orange logo) and the regular Wordpress one is in the middle column of this screen.
Australian model Miranda Kerr has revealed Hilton acted like a princess backstage at a lingerie range fashion show and stole her gorgeous runway outfit.
The 24-year-old model has revealed the whole incident on a blog, which ultimately left the hotel heiress humiliated when she had an embarrassing naked moment.
Kerr reveals Hilton showed up 10 minutes before the show opened at a theatre in Hollywood on November 15 and decided she wanted to close the catwalk show.
I have contacted the newspaper, to no avail: the story still stands online, despite Miranda having never revealed the matter on a blog, the incident never having taken place on November 15, 2007, and that it never happened at a Victoria’s Secret show.
To say that Paris Hilton wanted to close a show is a nice stretch of the imagination considering she never attempted to do any such thing: no wonder the famous get sick of tabloid journalism (that even broadsheets engage in now). I can’t even place the world’s presently most photographed woman at the show, but Paris-watchers will be able to say for sure.
I know the Victoria’s Secret show is in the Zeitgeist at the moment and all of this is great for the telecast, but does the Times really need the extra ad revenue from this piece when it does the newspaper little credit?
In India, the item may have been misreported initially by Kiran Pahwa at Top News: there is an item from November 28 at topnews.in. There, it details the wrong venue, date and how Miranda revealed the matter to Sassybella (which in fact only posted a Pedestrian.tv video).
You would think a colleague’s tip-off would have been treated with more astuteness and immediacy: the San Francisco Chronicle knew when to take a story offline when it found out the facts were wrong. Yahoo! News recently had to publish a correction on another Paris Hilton story after the Associated Press got some info wrong, and the AP alerted those carrying its stories.
A correction would be a good thing to do: we all eat humble pie from time to time.
Hopefully this is the last post tracking how this item of fake news is propagated.
Fascinating: afterour post exposing the Miranda Kerr v. Paris Hilton incident at Victoria’s Secret to be false—or at least ridiculously inaccurate, with media outlets getting the year and the venue wrong—the Chronicle’s SFGate.com still reported it. It has taken the post down now, but not before Google News found it:
Yes, we are feeling smug, but only because the error was so great that we can’t believe how it propagated. Even the source site, Pedestrian.tv, is amazed, having A Current Affair contact it this week over two-year-old news.
It stresses the importance for traditional media outlets to be careful. We’re not perfect ourselves, so it’s a lesson we need to take heed of, too.
Quite a few people will have caught the gossip that Miranda Kerr, the Australian model, was upset when Paris Hilton waltzed in to a Heatherette show in 2005 and chose a pink dress that Kerr was scheduled to wear on the catwalk. The organizers obliged and Kerr decided she would leave the matter to karma. Karma delivered in the form of Naomi Campbell, who wanted the same outfit, and Hilton was given the same treatment as it was reassigned to the supermodel.
I caught the item on Channel 9 (Australia) this morning, two years after the incident (this is news?). And according to one report, the source was not the Murdoch Press or even Reuter, but Kerr’s own blog.
In fact, nearly everyone is reporting this as an incident that happened at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show earlier this month.
If Kerr’s blog had been the source, I was all prepared to note how blogs can be the source of news for the MSM. This presupposes that the news itself is reasonably trivial—I have noticed through experience that some “journalists” (and vain bloggers) cannot handle irony or humour more sophisticated than a fart gag. Good manners prevent me from naming them publicly.
But as I read about Kerr posting in the ’sphere, could I find links to her official blog to double-check the article? No. Not even the places that say she blogged the item linked it.
The reason is that I don’t think Miranda Kerr has a personal blog, at least not one that can be readily found.
So rather than this post being about the growth of the blogosphere as a news source, it’s turning into one about gross misreporting.
The only place that seemed to have cited and linked the correct source is Sassybella, naming Pedestrian.tv:
I applaud Helen at Sassybella for getting her facts right and for being the only journalist (that I have found) to point out that this was a two-year-old incident—something lost on a lot of (re-)reporters this week, including the Murdoch Press.
I also applaud my friends at Heatherette. Richie and co. could have gotten publicity out of the incident but they chose to stay mum about such matters.
Conclusion: the blogosphere and MSM are becoming closer and closer. The good bloggers getting their facts right are few and far between, and there seem to be fewer journalists upholding traditional standards among the mainstream media. This has become a news item that has been broadcast on TV and appeared online, with everyone but Sassybella (based on my searches) getting the show and date wrong. And getting the time and place wrong is just plain negligent for a journalist.
There may be some blog comments out there bearing my name but were not written by me today. One of my team did go blog-surfing on my recommendation, but did so on a computer that I had not signed out of. How embarrassing. C’est la vie.
I don’t think it’s Mercury retrograde, but both telephones and the ’net were down at head office today, which explains the blissful phone-free silence. I thought it was down to the US recovering after Thanksgiving.
Another blog post was turned into a Lucire article today: my review of New Zealand airlines. Click here to read about my views on Air New Zealand versus Qantas versus the newcomer, Pacific Blue. Other news is scattered on sectional pages: new books from Lonely Planet; the Fiat 500 winning European Car of the Year; and the news in the earlier ‘Insider’ post about “first niece” Lauren Bush’s Feed 1 bags.
With these briefer news items, it’s becoming harder to tell which would be better in the blogosphere and which would be better on a traditional website page. They seem to work in both places.
Since last year, eagle-eyed readers will have noticed an RSS link at the top right of every page at Lucire’s online edition that does not work. This was due to a company that we had charged with creating our CMS (content management system) not delivering. But if readers do not mind, I would like to change that this Friday: the orange box will link to this blog’s feed. The feed will occasionally include new articles that are posted to the main part of the Lucire site, for interest, beginning with these three:
You’ve got to eat it to save it
If you’ve got a cultural, creative and culinary appetite or a passionate thirst for intrigue and history, then pull up a chair, grab a plate and take a big ol’ bite out of New Orleans by Karen Loftus
¡Cena spectacular! Stanley Moss visits a Spanish-themed eatery in the ever-popular Northeast district of Portland, Or., Toro Bravo, helmed by one of the city’s most memorable chefs photographed by the author
Enjoy these three articles, two of which are, so far, exclusive to this site.
A designer, who shall remain nameless, recently said that Lucire was the only New Zealand [fashion] magazine she knew of that had any real journalism in it. I was very happy to hear that feedback, and it seems the concern of fashion magazines lacking depth is something shared by others. Stevie Wilson, Lucire’s former US bureau chief and an editor with us for many years, wrote on her LA-Story.com blog how she has been chipping away at her subscriptions’ list as each magazine, in her opinion, becomes emptier. In particular, this quotation was interesting. Maybe celebs sell, but they are pissing more educated readers off: ‘I know I am busy but that never stopped me from reading magazines. well now it seems that the same celebs play a merry go round of switching covers and it’s BORING. I don’t find celebs appealing that much and with all the stuff they get, it’s not exciting.’
I know my own life is more interesting than what these stars get up to.
[Cross-posted] Remember Xanadu? It’s become somewhat of a cult hit even though in 1980 it was considered Olivia Newton-John’s mega-turkey. Stylistically, it sits uncomfortably between the 1970s and 1980s, as though there was a vacuum in between the decades. In one scene, Michael Beck insists to Gene Kelly that ‘It’s the ’80s’, but you know that it must have been shot in 1979 and people had not rebelled against disco at the time.
