A new first in social media ‘influencing’

Posted on October 3, 2023 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit has a plan. “If I gotta go back to work, I want to be one of them social media influencers,” he said. “That’s where the money is these days.”

“Not really,” I replied. ” But it’s where the media’s attention is. Just look at all the publicity that influencer in Philly got last week.”

In case you were living in an ashram and just got back, a social media influencer is someone with a strong internet presence who directs his or her online followers to a product or activity about which he or she has special knowledge or expertise. Tech-savvy influencers are now delving into fields as diverse as fashion and cosmetics, food and restaurants, and real estate.

In Philadelphia, a 21-year-old influencer known as Meatball was arrested last week after she live-streamed the looting of retail stores in various parts of the city by gangs of young people, most of them Black. The looting took place shortly after charges were dismissed in the case of a white cop who, without provocation, shot and killed a young Black man in Philly in August.

Meatball, who is Black, was charged with six felonies, including criminal mischief and conspiracy. But was she conspiring with looters or merely documenting the looting incidents for her 185,000 Instagram followers? That’s for the courts to decide, but the recordings she made certainly don’t help her case.

Swamp Rabbit was impressed by Meatball’s social media skills, and now he wants to make his mark in the influencer racket. He has heard of people who work influencer-type jobs — marketing, public relations and sales positions that involve convincing consumers to buy things they don’t need and do things they’d be better off not doing. Bullshit jobs is what David Graeber called them.

“I can influence with the best of them,” Swamp Rabbit said. “And I can do it without working for some higher-ups who would take credit for what I done on my own.”

“Just don’t become a looting influencer,” I replied. “I’m not bailing you out if you do.”

Footnote: According to Morning Consult, 86 percent of young people would like to use their social media platforms to try to become influencers, even though most existing influencers make little or no money at it. The ones who make big money — “mega-influencers” — usually have already made a name for themselves in their chosen fields by the time they enter the racket.

 

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A bigoted Earthling with interplanetary dreams

Posted on September 28, 2023 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I saw a news report about Elon Musk, who wants to direct the course of wars and launch billionaires to Mars. He owns a big chunk of social media and is in the electric car business, but he seems to have nothing but contempt for his fellow humans.

I asked Swamp Rabbit if he agrees that it’s hard to have faith in a future that’s being molded by psychos who control all the capital. We’ll be lucky if we make it through the winter, I told him.

“I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “We made it through the summer, we’ll make it through the winter.”

“The hottest summer ever recorded,” I said. “The world was on fire.”

He got out his phone and showed me a news story in which the world’s foremost energy economist states that “the rapid uptake of solar panels and electric vehicles” has renewed his hope that the nations of the world will achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and thus avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis. This despite the fact that the climate continues to change “at frightening speed.”

“Glad to hear about someone who looks on the bright side,” I said, making an effort to suppress my doubts.

For one thing, reaching net zero would require a consistently high level of cooperation among the nations that spew the largest amounts of greenhouse gas — China, the US, India, the European Union and Russia. How likely is long-term cooperation given the current levels of enmity and mistrust among world powers?

Another reason for pessimism is Musk and the other obscenely wealthy jackasses who dominate the news cycle. Musk’s Teslas run clean but he has made it clear that he’s a bigoted kook who’s more committed to establishing a “multiplanetary” civilization than to averting climate disaster on Earth. He wants to use Twitter — X, as he calls it — and his other holdings to fight the “the woke-mind virus,” as he told Walter Isaacson, his biographer and most well-regarded cheerleader.

“You’re just mad because you can’t afford one of them electric cars,” Swamp Rabbit said as I continued to badmouth Musk.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, but if I could afford an EV, I wouldn’t buy one of his.”

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Jann Wenner’s R&R ‘masters’ are all rich white guys

Posted on September 20, 2023 by oddmanout215

Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner’s book of interviews he conducted with famous rock ‘n’ roll artists will be published next week. It’s called The Masters, and its subjects are Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Jerry Garcia, Pete Townshend, Bono and Bruce Springsteen. Here’s Wenner responding to a reporter who asked why the book doesn’t include any interviews with Black or female artists:

Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.

It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses. It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock ‘n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did.

The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock. Of Black artists, you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as masters, the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was taken aback, not so much because Wenner’s comments are so controversial but rather because they’re so … inarticulate. For example, “…None of them [women rockers] were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.”

“Ain’t this the same guy who ran the rock ‘n’ roll Bible?” Swamp Rabbit said. “The hippest magazine that ever was? Your main source of info about the sounds that shaped your boomer generation? How could he say such stupid shit?”

I told him Rolling Stone was once a great magazine. That Wenner hired some of the most insightful music writers and investigative reporters in the business and kept the magazine operating at a high level throughout the years when rock ‘n’ roll was a dominant force in the culture.

“But don’t put words in my mouth,” I said. “I liked Rolling Stone because of the writing, not because it spoke for my generation, so-called. I don’t even know what that means. And Wenner, great editor that he was, always struck me as a starstruck, self-important jerk.”

Before going any further, I should note that Swamp Rabbit is considerably younger than me, even though he looks like an old bum and sometimes talks like a reactionary. He’s only dimly aware that the era of the rock ‘n’ roll star is over. That the era of great rock ‘n’ roll songs has passed. That the rock ‘n’ roll he grew up with in the 1990s and beyond was, with few exceptions, far less innovative and memorable than the rock ‘n’ roll made in previous decades. No wonder he’s so jaded.

“Do some research,” I said. “It’s no accident that Rolling Stone began declining around the same time that rock ‘n’ roll began losing its cultural relevance.”

“You sound as snooty as Wenner,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “You probably wouldn’t include any Blacks and women on your list of great rockers.”

“Looking back, I’d put Aretha Franklin on my list,” I said. “Chrissie Hynde, Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Grace Slick, Chuck Berry, Jimi effin’ Hendrix, to name a few. It’s partly a question of whether you think soul and funk and other music genres can fit under the rock ‘n’ roll umbrella. Wenner clearly doesn’t.”

Footnote: Wenner could have spared himself a ton of trouble if he’d simply told the NY Times that his interview subjects were chosen because they were his favorite rockers and buddies of his. But he went out of his way to put down Blacks and women because… he’s a jerk.

One more: It seems Wenner forgot what one of the masters wrote: Come gather ’round people wherever you roam/And admit that the waters around you have grown/And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone…

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No existential catastrophe (author lays 6-to-1 odds)

Posted on September 5, 2023 by oddmanout215

The heat goes on, breaking records. Time has become a slow-motion blur that flattens everything I say and do. Incidents that should matter are like river flotsam, here one minute, gone the next. But the river, visible from the dirt path next to the Tinicum swamp, just keeps on rolling. Its progress would soothe me if I wasn’t so maladaptive.

“What’s maladaptive?” says my neighbor Swamp Rabbit. “Where’d you get that word?”

I tell him it’s a buzzword from one of those self-help books that well-off Americans are drawn to. Eat Doze Rinse Repeat, et al.

Such books are all well and good, and the media love them, but what if existential catastrophe is imminent? What will happen to us if the levees break?

I’ve been researching these questions, but online popup stories keep impeding my progress. What were Nazi German soldiers like in person? Why didn’t Don Knotts return to the Andy Griffith Show? When I start lingering over dispatches like these, I realize how badly I’m procrastinating. Maybe I really don’t want to know what’s up.

Swamp Rabbit says I’m too pessimistic: “You gotta kick this end-of-days obsession. It ain’t healthy.”

All is not lost, he tells me. Russian scientists are growing watermelons in Antarctica. The American government is spending $1 billion on a giant carbon-extraction machine. Philosopher Toby Ord, author of The Precipice, has crunched the numbers and thinks there’s only a 1-in-6 chance of an existential catastrophe occurring within the next hundred years. (Only the gods know how he arrived at that figure.)

Thoughts and Prayers, my housecats, seem unimpressed when I relay the good news as I watch the skies for wildfire smoke. “I don’t trust Ord’s estimate either,” I tell them. “Then again, I’m not a numbers guy… and I’m maladaptive.”

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Global warming or global boiling? What about floods?

Posted on August 28, 2023 by oddmanout215

We were discussing the weather, a popular topic these days. My neighbor Swamp Rabbit told me what the UN secretary-general had said: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”

“Great quote, but what about global flooding?” I asked. Swamp Rabbit laughed, so I informed him that hotter weather means more droughts but also heavier downpours when the rains come. That means more floods like the one that left two million people homeless in Pakistan last year. And sea levels are rising as ice melts at the poles.

We were on our way to sell renewable energy at a gay pride event on a brutally hot day. I was in a good mood because the crowds at pride events are generally more receptive to wind and solar options than, for instance, crowds at Celtic festivals, where the focus is on beer-drinking and bagpipes.

We stepped into the crowd. Famous divas lip-synced disco hits. Swamp Rabbit waved a tiny rainbow flag. Little Bo-Peep raised her shepherd’s cane to greet the Gimp from Pulp Fiction and the bearded ballerina at the other end of his leash. A sudden rain shower chased us through the sculpture garden to the gallery. I looked around for coffee, but none of the food vendors had any.

Swamp Rabbit was miffed. He wanted me to walk across the grassy field to meet Varinia, his artist/shopkeeper friend, but I never meet anyone until I’ve had my coffee. We were in a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia – Abington, I think. I drove to the nearest convenience store, more than a mile away.

When I got back, the shower had become a steady downpour. The show was over. Swamp Rabbit jumped into my car and scolded me for drinking coffee while driving. I took an alternate route back to South Philly with the idea of avoiding the sort of flash floods that had skirted New York City a few weeks earlier.

“The ocean will have us all,” I said, quoting an old John Cale song.

Swamp Rabbit told me I was crazy. A heat dome was still hanging over much of the country. Wildfires were burning all the boreal forests in Canada and were devastating Maui.

“The fires will have us, not the floods,” he said.

Lightning flashed as we argued. The rain stopped, but a pickup truck at Broad and Erie almost demolished us when I blew through a stop sign.

“Way to go,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Keep driving like that and you won’t have to worry about the weather no more.”

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Robbie Robertson (1943-2023) and the rock of ages

Posted on August 16, 2023 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit and I were talking about the death at age 80 of Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist and main songwriter in the Band, one of the most artful and influential acts in rock ‘n’ roll history.

I’m tempted to use the word “legendary.” Robertson’s most enduring work with the Band — the studio albums Music from Big Pink, The Band and Stage Fright — were released way back in 1968, 1969 and 1970, respectively.

“Don’t forget that live album, Rock of Ages,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Is that the perfect title, or what?”

Life on the road took its toll, and Robertson had a gradual falling-out with his bandmates in the 1970s. Their final concert together was captured in Martin Scorsese’s classic film The Last Waltz (1978). After the breakup, Robertson was happy to engage in a decades-long goodbye, recounting for numerous interviewers and in his memoir Testimony (2016) how he and the other Band members — drummer Levon Helm, piano man Richard Manuel, bassist Rick Danko and organist Garth Hudson — drew on American roots music to forge their eclectic, inimitable sound.

Many music fans who are the same age now as Robertson was at his songwriting peak are probably unfamiliar with most of his recordings with the Band and unaware of the long, strange trip he made from Toronto, near the Indian reservation where his mother was born, to commercial success and critical acclaim in America. The obits are informative, but the Band’s history and legacy are complex. How do you explain the miracle of great art?

“I don’t know, Odd Man,” Swamp Rabbit said, rolling his eyes. “How do you do that?”

You don’t even try, I told him. You direct listeners to the Band’s recordings to hear for themselves how Robertson and his fellow misfits — three of them also from Canada, one from Arkansas — evolved into a tight unit that sounded both old-timey and strikingly original. “It’s like you’d never heard them before and like they’d always been there,” Bruce Springsteen said in the documentary Once Were Brothers (2020).

You tell them that the Band spent years mastering their craft by backing up the wild journeyman rocker Ronnie Hawkins and then Bob Dylan before succeeding on their own. And how it’s no accident that Robertson, the son of a Native American mother and a Jewish gangster father, populated his songs with colorful outsiders who brought to life his “mythic but authentic” vision of America.

You point to the interviews with Robertson in The Last Waltz. Has there ever been a cooler or more articulate self-appointed champion of rock ‘n’ roll music? Will there be another in our time?

“Your second question is so ridiculous, it don’t even deserve an answer,” Swamp Rabbit said.

Footnote: Robertson didn’t dry up after the Band’s demise. He made solo albums and wrote soundtracks for Scorsese and other filmmakers. His last score with Scorsese was for Killers of the Flower Moon, set for theatrical release in October.

One more: Check out the scholarly, insightful and heartfelt essay on the Band in Greil Marcus’s book Mystery Train; Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music

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DeSantis: Let’s look on the bright side of slavery

Posted on August 2, 2023 by oddmanout215

I showed Swamp Rabbit recent articles about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who backs the state requirement that middle-schoolers in Texas be taught that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

The requirement, part of Florida’s new standards for teaching African American history, prompted New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz to air the grievances of an imaginary victim of “white underprivilege”:

An unskilled Florida man said that he deeply regrets having missed out on the opportunity to be a slave. The man said that his “lack of access to enslavement” had made his acquisition of essential skills “impossible.”

“Every day when I mess something up at work, I wonder to myself, would I be doing a better job if I’d been a slave?” he said. “There’s no question that it would have been a game-changer for me.”

At this point it’s no secret that, in a field of Republican presidential candidates who are bigoted, oblivious, or just plain mean, DeSantis is a standout. His politics are as loathsome as Donald Trump’s, but he seems much less likely to appeal to a broad cross-section of voters. He whines constantly and has the charisma of a crash-test dummy.

“Trump can at least make them yahoos laugh,” Swamp Rabbit said. “DeSantis don’t even know what a joke is.”

His attempt to convince voters that there was a good side to slavery is in keeping with his support for Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act,” which calls for the teaching of an alternative American history that soft-pedals racism and, in effect, bans information that might make public school students feel “shamed because of their race.”

I told Swamp Rabbit that DeSantis’s views on slavery are weirdly reminiscent of an old Randy Newman song, the one that’s narrated by a slave trader who’s trying to coax Africans onto a slave ship bound for America:

In America you get food to eat/Won’t have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet/You just think about Jesus and drink wine all day/It’s good to be an American

“The guy in the song lies about the future,” I said. “DeSantis lies about the past.”

Clarification: DeSantis, a graduate of Harvard Law School, had this to say about the new curriculum: “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”

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A tub of Cheez Whiz shall lead them

Posted on July 26, 2023 by oddmanout215

Jennifer Rubin was bemoaning the GOP’s undying loyalty to the worst president in U.S. history. She may have offended some of her editors at Washington Post with this observation:

And, frankly, the mainstream media has made it that much easier for cowardly Republicans to stick with Trump. Rather than challenge Republicans at every turn to defend their embrace of Trump or even to examine seriously the historical origins of toxic racist, xenophobic and delusional beliefs, the mainstream media largely sticks to horserace politics.

Right. Just when you think the corporate media can’t get any lamer, they hit you with another puff piece about Donald Trump’s latest adventures on the campaign trail. A few weeks ago, for example, when reporters covered his carefully staged appearance at Pat’s King of Steaks in South Philly, a few miles from my home in the Tinicum swamp.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit listened to me vent about the event and said, “I was in the neighborhood that day, walking to Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar. Why was Trump at Pat’s?”

I reminded him that Pat’s is where you can order a greasy minute steak on a long roll and top it with an artery clogger called Cheez Whiz. If you’re eating a cheesesteak at Pat’s, then your diet is a lot like Trump’s. Chances are your politics are like his, too.

“Trump is the embodiment of the Cheez Whiz lifestyle,” I said. ” He’s even the same color.”

“You’re one of them reverse bigots,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “Puttin’ down peeps just coz they’re tacky and don’t eat right.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “But my point is that the media were focused on the food when they should have been focused on the questionable legality of his candidacy.”

I noted that Trump was impeached twice while president. That he has since been found liable in civil court for sexual assault, indicted for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, indicted on charges related to the mishandling of classified documents, and likely to be indicted soon in separate cases involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol and election interference in Georgia.

“Every story about Trump should mention there’s something wrong with laws that allow an indicted lowlife to run for office,” I said. “The laws shouldn’t allow Republicans to nominate an extra-large tub of Cheez Whiz for president again.”

“Maybe not, but that’s for the peeps to decide,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “That’s democracy in America, Odd Man.”

Footnote: We’re not talking about poor people here. Cheesesteaks at Pat’s are expensive. The cheesesteak eaters include many tourists and suburbanites.

Update: Trump was hit with three new felony charges yesterday, none of them related to the Jan. 6 incident. How many rats will flee before the ship finally sinks?

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Behold! Seven-headed dragons just up ahead.

Posted on July 24, 2023 by oddmanout215

I was telling Swamp Rabbit about former VP Al Gore’s recent comments on global warming, which included this one-liner: “Every night the TV news is like taking a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.”

“That’s pretty funny,” Swamp Rabbit said, “but I hope he ain’t turning into one of them crazy end-timers.”

“He was comparing the climate crisis to the goofiest book in the Bible,” I replied. “He was making a joke.”

Gore was a divinity student before he became a politician, I explained. He intones like a preacher but he’s down-to-earth and knows what he’s talking about. Some of the people who used to regard his movie An Inconvenient Truth (2006) as alarmist nonsense have realized, belatedly, that he was right to conclude global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels is changing the world as we know it, and not for the good.

I called up my handy-dandy online Book of Revelation and showed Swamp Rabbit the passages about fires spread by seven-headed dragons, the sky darkened by smoke from the abyss, the cities wiped out by seven angels carrying seven deadly plagues.

“Revelation barely made it into the Bible,” I told him. “Some first-century sci-fi writer must have dreamed it up.”

Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “Give the peeps what they want, right?”

I played “Bad Moon Rising” on my phone and told him the planet might still be saved if we enlighten the hardcore yahoos who think coal is clean and Democrats drink the blood of butchered children to reverse the aging process.

“But we’ll need strong counter-narratives,” I said. “The sort of compelling, science-based stories that Al Gore tells so well.”

Swamp Rabbit chuckled. “I hate to break it to you, Odd Man, but them yahoos like death angels and seven-headed dragons. What they don’t like is Al Gore.”

“They’d better get over that,” I said. “Greece is on fire. Phoenix just had its 24th consecutive day of 110 degree-plus temperatures.”

“Don’t make no difference to them Phoenicians,” he replied, “so long as the air-conditioning still works.”

Footnote: “Bad Moon Rising” might be the most cheerful apocalyptic song ever. REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” is another good one.

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A wake-up call, or just an excuse to zone out?

Posted on July 17, 2023 by oddmanout215

I forgot to turn off the radio before I left my shack to go to work. My cats, Thoughts and Prayers, were locked in and had to listen all day to scary weather reports on NPR. No wonder they seemed spooked.

“It’s okay, you guys” I assured them. “The weather is getting to all of us.”

Freakish floods in the Hudson Valley and Vermont. Heat domes stretching across the South and Southwest, with highs in Phoenix of at least 110 degrees for 17 straight days and counting. Ocean temperatures that are “beyond extreme.” Endless wildfires in Canada. Here in the Philadelphia swamps, the usual killer humidity plus air quality alerts and constant storm warnings.

Recent online headlines are instructive. “Tuesday was world’s hottest day on record.” “Floods, heat, smoke: Climate change is accelerating.” And “Is it hot enough yet for politicians to take real action?“

The question was posed by environmentalist Bill McKibbon, who noted that most countries “remain dominated by the fossil-fuel industry,” even those that have endorsed caps on oil and gas emissions. He described how anti-pollution measures by Joe Biden in the United States and Justin Trudeau in Canada have been undermined by politicians and lobbyists who back dirty-energy companies.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit walked in clutching a bottle of Wild Turkey as I was scooping Mariner’s Catch into the cat food bowls. He was in a devil’s advocate mood. I told him about McKibbon’s call for more worldwide rallies to fight polluters.

“I ain’t no world traveler,” my mangy friend said. “Why should I care that the Acropolis is closed on account of the heat?”

“Be serious,” I told him. “We live in a small world. Climate disasters in Southern Europe and Pakistan and Greenland affect us all. We’ve got to elect politicians who are enlightened enough to take action.”

“Blah blah,” he replied. “Most peeps in this country just wanna zone out in air-conditioned la-la land. The only thing gonna wake ’em up now is fire and floods, and even that might not work.”

The cats looked at him funny then bolted out the door and into the swamp. “Way to go,” I said. “You scared them away with your doom talk.”

“I ain’t surprised,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “Cats got more sense than humans.”

Footnote: “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” is from Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On album, released 52 years ago.

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