Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert plan to return to TV on 7 January while their writers stay out on strike. Off air for two months, the latte-drinking (probably), liberal-leaning (certainly) presenters, funny men, princes of political satire etc say they would much rather return with their comrade writers — beyond this, words (as well as their principles, perhaps) fail them:
If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence.
- NY Times 071221
Just published, graphic novel Shooting War by Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman: it’s 2011 and anti-corporate blogger Jimmy Burns is working as an embed for Global News - ‘Your home for 24-hour terror coverage’ - in President McCain’s Iraq… And boom. The beta online version is available here.
Curious to note that sensitive US indie-rock band Death Cab for Cutie — catch them on Atlantic Records, a subsidiary of the colossal Warner Music Group, catch them on the OC, Fox’s top-rating TV drama about the affluent youth of Orange County, CA — ultimately gets its name from sociologist Richard Hoggart, from The Uses of Literacy, his 1957 critique of British popular culture.
In conversation with the once angry young man, now grand old man of British cultural studies, DJ Taylor evaluates Hoggart’s thesis 50 years on — a culture devised by ordinary people for themselves is being stamped out by a mass culture devised by corporations for maximising shareholder profit.