just like the first time

Just like the first time and we may be starting over…Appeal to the base, get the first time voters off the couch and into the booth. Mother Lena Dunham will give them a basic anatomy course and stimulate the viral and vital  fluids. Two minutes in a dimly lit booth with Mr. Hunka Hunka Obamster, rushing back in from a quick smoke. More hipsters tread-milling on another authenticity hoax. The Dems are bottom feeding, leveraging their oft-used and now frayed card of their unique relationship to popular culture with President Obama at the inflection point. And it does work, even if popular culture, – Pauline Kael: ” I didn’t know popular culture would be the only culture!”- is violent,excessive, misogynist, racist and a host of other qualities that run counter to the DNC’s ostensible political culture. It doesn’t matter. The medium, like McCluhan stated, or rather, the context itself, is the message. In a small but not insignificant way, the election is also a referendum on popular culture, our now Orwellian, but at one time just Adorno’s “culture industries” overblown to the point of being economically destructive; particularly when a pop culture icon like Obama appears to have absolutely no core beliefs, just a milquetoast attitude to one and all…

—Leonard Norwitz:The difficulty for me is that he goes one step further – a step that must have made audiences squirm nervously fifty years ago – it is Ethan’s obsession to kill the girl who he believes must have become “soiled” by intimate association with her captors. His intention is dramatized by the many confrontations he has with his companion on his five year search, Martin Pawley (played with a young man’s naïve passion by Jeffrey Hunter.) Martin feels that Debbie is innocent, regardless of her contact with the Indian. But Ethan has to obliterate her, not least, in part, because of his own guilt for the deaths of her parents and her own capture….Read More:http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews32/the_searchers_blu-ray.htm

On her hit HBO show “Girls,” writer-creator-star Lena Dunham hasn’t been shy about talking about sex, life and her twentysomething generation. Her new pro-Obama video aims to be just as bold, or brazen, depending on where you’re coming from politically.

“Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody,” Dunham says in the spot. “You want to do it with a great guy.”…

— it was never meant to — but it’s solid “proof of the Democrats’ savvy in appealing to the portion of the population that some might describe as hipsters.” The voting virginity angle is “a clever conceit,” says Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy, but hardly a new one. In fact, essentially “the same joke was used in an ad for Vladimir Putin’s presidential campaign earlier this year.”—Read More:http://theweek.com/article/index/235467/lena-dunhams-your-first-time-obama-ad-too-racy Image: Helen Levitt MOMA

She’s talking about voting. Or maybe sex. Or maybe both, depending on how private your voting booth is.

It should come as no surprise that in such a tight election, the clip, titled “Lena Dunham: Your First Time,” has sharply divided viewers. “Please don’t blame yourself for ending Obama’s campaign. (Read More:http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/tag/lena-dunham-your-first-time/

Walter Benjamin: There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees on single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.

—Klee. Angel of History—Romney and his allies entered the last three weeks of the campaign with $151 million to spend — $50 million per week — while Obama and the Democrats had $114 million, according to reports filed yesterday with the Federal Election Commission.
“Obama’s campaign bet on their ability to define Romney during the summer season, and outspent him by a large margin early on,” said Rogan Kersh, a campaign-finance specialist and provost at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “Romney’s team guessed that the final two weeks would decide the race, and saved funds accordingly. If the race stays close, Romney’s financial advantage could be a decisive factor.”—Read More:http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-25/adelsons-give-10-million-more-to-pro-romney-super-pac

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…The involvement of pop culture figures, such asWill.i.am or for that matter, the “Obama Girl” were closely linked to Obama’s success in motivating young voters to participate in the politic

rocess for the first time. What links do you and your contributors draw between the two?

Yanes: I think one reason why pop culture figures drew the attention of young voters to Obama is because they understood how young people interact with new media. In my opinion, the main difference in behavior between those who rely on traditional media and those who rely on new media is that new media is constantly being thrown at consumers and is always available to be observed.

For example, if the “Obama Girl” video were to have been played on MTV at first, it would have never generated the attention it received. That would have required people to sit still long enough to watch MTV and then waiting for the video to show. Instead, people were able to see their friends post the video on their facebook page, and after seeing more and more friends discuss the video, they were then able to click on a link and watch the video for themselves. Regardless of what time it was or where they were at, new media allowed these pro-Obama ads to be available to consumers. This availability is something standard television networks can’t replicate yet. Read More:http://henryjenkins.org/2012/10/derrais-carter-and-nicholas-yanes-talk-about-iconic-obama-part-two.html

Hoping Obama doesn’t go “women lying in ponds and distributing swords,” and do a weekend bombing of Libya as an act of damage control. “Hey, we didn’t use drones, we did it the ole’ fashioned way…”

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