the mystery of the love of war

I'm doing publicity for The Mystery of Love, a two-hour PBS documentary special, airing prime time Dec. 13 across most of the country. The program puts love on the public agenda and is an interesting take on a subject often dominated by one-dimensional and misleading caricatures in popular culture. One of the most compelling segments explores "love's darker sides" with Dr. James Hillman, world-famous Jungian psychologist and author of A Terrible Love of War. Hillman discusses the feelings of community and brotherhood soldiers find on the battlefield.

"The ecstasy can be the highest moment ever experienced, as many battle veterans say. That would make it in common with other kinds of passionate love: sexual love; divine love; mystical love. You become crazy, in a way, just as you do in a passionate affair. You break the rules; you break the bounds; you're outside of yourself; you find a whole new personality in yourself. Maybe that's a shadow of love."

Here are a couple snippets I posted to YouTube.

"There's a beauty in war people don't like to talk about."

"When the men in the [two World Wars] were asked what they were fighting for, why they were there, the interviews all came out the same way: they were there not because of democracy, not because of protecting the country; but for the other guys. They were there for love of their unit."

explore 'the mystery of love'

[ If the flyer below doesn't display properly, you can see it at http://m2v.net/scott/postcard.html ]

hijacking colbert

Amy Goodman, host of "Democracy Now!", was on "The Colbert Report" (Comedy Central) recently. Of course it's on YouTube. She is truly a firebrand, as Colbert called her. I saw her speak at a Green Festival in DC last year and was moved, nearly to tears. She should be president.

But watching this segment (and a recent morning show appearance — don't remember which one — filmed outside with an audience in which her approach was pretty much the same), I couldn't help but feel for her. Her approach works great with the choir, but what about shows like this? If you get a chance to watch this segment, do you think she was effective? Are those that aren't already part of the choir going to consider the teachings of the church? If you were to coach her before appearing on the show, would you advise her to change her approach?

Colbert is liberal and the show is satirical, of course, but it's entertainment. Is there a better way to use pop culture?

I'm reminded of a Progressive PR Professionals event early last year with the ED of The Fortune Society, Joanne Page: "Working with the Media When the Topic is Not Warm and Fuzzy." She's gone mano-a-mano with O'Reilly and gave these pointers (quoted from the event summary):

On adversarial programs, such as "The O'Reilly Factor," representatives get their few minutes of say, but then the name of the game is to interrupt as often as possible to make your points. Her specific advice for these venues:

* Speak to the audience, not to the interviewer. * Build your case on "shared common sense decency perspective" to hook the viewing audience, who have not thought about your issue from that angle. * Shift the frame. "If you use their frame, then you're dead in the water." * Create the context. * Learn to speak in their rhythm, pace. * Try to make only three points and keep returning to them.

But what about programs that aren't truly adversarial but are in a satirical sense or are simply pop-culture fluff. How important is context in framing and delivering? Speaking to the audience applies, and when the audience is tuning in for entertainment, shouldn't you wrap the messaging with pretty paper and a bow?

the real world (at a glance)

How do you encapsulate a single moment on earth? How do you quantify the human experience that exists during that moment, creating a record of global human history? Telephone conversations, emails, love letters, business trends? How do you present it?

Artist Jonathan Harris pondered these big notions and drew some interesting, very contemporary insights. “Ultimately I decided that news photographs do the best job of summarizing the stuff that matters on earth, on a very broad scale, at any given moment,” he says. That led to 10x10, a curious piece of new media art that aggregates and analyzes the top 100 words and images in the world every hour and displays them in an interactive ten-by-ten grid. (You may have already heard about it; within days of its November 4 launch, it was the 10th most popular link on the web, according to one site. CNN and USA Today and others soon took it beyond the blogosphere.)

This information visualization project is a bit of Google News with a dash of Google Zeitgeist. It does what thousands of blogging news junkies do, but in a more structured and visual way. And more than just feeding the addiction, it puts this snapshot of our world into context, a larger – and with no human intervention, raw and objective – perspective. As the website points out, it’s “often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous.” It’s reality – at least as reported by the global news media.

Harris' inbox has been flooded by emails from people around the world moved by 10x10's unique - and often upsetting - view of the world. One day in particular that moved the masses: the day Yasser Arafat died. "Most days, the grid is filled with a variety of images on all sorts of topics," he reflects, "but every now and then something so important happens that the whole world pauses and looks. Arafat's death was one such event, and for one day, 10x10 was covered almost entirely with pictures of him. Moments like that you know you're watching history being made, and I find that quite powerful."

[excerpted from my upcoming article in Photo District News (PDN), February print issue]

proud to be un-american

"I'd like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony...."