Post Episode Conversations

When Richard Price describes the chain of command, and responsibility, that starts at the cop leaning over the dead body on the street and goes all the way up to the Mayor, he says, “it’s about job protection. The higher up you go, the more your job is not about the job you are supposed to do. Your job is about helping your boss look good, and your underling’s job is about helping you look good.”

While Price here is describing the dynamics of a high profile murder investigation in New York City, his outline of the systematic structure of work life in general may sound uncomfortably familiar.

What do you think?

In the last episode, our guests discuss for a moment the distinction between low and high art. So I was struck when this topic "reemerged" when I visited the new Takashi Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. In the intro to the show, we are told that Murakami mixes what appears to be "high" and "low" art to a Western eye, but that he merely reflects Japanese culture, which according to him at least, traditionally does not distinguish between either.

Is that true? I don't seem to be able to get more info online about this. No low Kaikai and high Kiki? Really?

Hajdu underlines the outsider status of comic book creators in the ‘40s and ‘50s. He states that they felt that “in comics they could express a sentiment and a sensibility that wasn’t welcome elsewhere. They felt that comics was a place where they were welcome.”

What is the status of the intellectual or polemic outsider in 2008? What speech today falls outside the realm of permissible discourse – that is, what we call “the mainstream media,” e.g., The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, etc.?

Noam Chomsky comes to mind right away. He is completely absent from the mainstream media.

What do you think?

Toward the end of the show, Dan poses the question to the group, “Is there anything you’d like to see banned in cultural expression? Is there anything that you all would like to see NOT be publicly available?”

In response, two of the panelists express discomfort with what they see as the harmful effects of different aspects of contemporary culture, although they make clear that they would not call for a ban on the expressions they find problematic.

Gilmour, for example, believes that pornography “harms the soul,” and that “no good can come of it.” Hajdu is disturbed by the level, and kind, of violence that is now common in movies, singling out films like “Hostel: Part II,” and wondering if there is a connection between the numbing effect of young people being exposed to such films in their ordinary cultural diet, and what he sees as a passivity in today’s young people with regard to the events in Iraq. He doesn't want to ban "Hostel: Part II," but he wishes that we lived in a society where people didn't want to go see it.

What do you think?

David Gilmour raised two fascinating issues, to say the least.

The first one is, at what point of suffering do let your kid step outside the “normal” track? One viewer (Lisa, on the home page) already has made clear her view that Gilmour made a mistake letting his son drop out of high school.

However, when you watch the program it is clear that, as he said, Gilmour believed that “high school was killing” his son and that he couldn’t stand by and watch it happen.

The second issue is Gilmour’s – also impassioned – statement that “boys need their fathers.” Gilmour claims that the really important result of their three movie a week regimen was that (because of the confluence of Gilmour’s temporary unemployment with his son’s crisis) it allowed father and son to spend much larger amounts of time together at that time in life than is usual in our society.

What do you think?

In light of the latest "Fiction is Better than Reality" Memoir scandal, I am curious to hear from our viewers on this topic. Would it matter if Julie Klam's memoir was fictional? Is it an ethical issue or a literary one? Or perhaps even more simply a mere question of semantic. Who knows after all what is true in many "unauthorized biographies"; History itself changes as new documents are made available or are discovered.
More important, perhaps: who is at fault here? the writer desperate for attention/and humiliation or an industry that -- like every other one -- cares about sales and ratings?