When Quoting Verse, One Must Be Terse

[ed.  My favorite topic these days: copyright - this time as it relates to quoting poetry.  Our copyright laws definitely need an overhaul, but would you trust this Congress, or any other in recent memory, to produce anything forward-looking and fair?  Yeah...me, neither.]

by David Orr

Copyright law is so often a matter of guesswork and loopholes, small print and obscure provisions. One such provision, dating from the ’70s, has recently come to the music industry’s attention. “Termination rights” allow musicians to reclaim the copyrights on their songs after 35 years — meaning songs from albums like Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” may soon be back in the hands of George Clinton and his funkified compatriots. Late last month, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called on Congress to clarify the statute in question in order to protect artists’ rights.

Would that the uncertainties of copyright law in my industry garnered so much attention.

American poetry criticism faces a major problem, one that has nothing to do with poetry, or readers, or anything remotely literary. The problem is that a critic who wants to quote a poem in a book has to face a permissions regime that ranges from unpredictable to plain crazy, as I discovered while working on a guidebook to modern poetry for general readers. The permissions took months to compile, and the initial estimate was nearly $20,000.

The difficulty is not so much that the copyright system is restrictive (although it can be), but that no one has any idea exactly how much of a poem can be quoted without payment. Under the “fair use” doctrine, quotation is permitted for criticism and comment, so you’d think this is where a poetry critic could hang his hat. But how much use is fair use?

If you ask publishers, the answer varies — a lot. Some think a quarter of a short poem is appropriate, some think almost an entire poem can be acceptable in the right circumstances, and many others believe you should quote only three or four lines. If you want to play it safe — and that’s what your own publisher will most likely prefer — then you’ll find yourself adhering to the three- or four-line standard.

But that standard doesn’t make much sense. Poems, like excuses, come in all shapes and sizes. They range from single lines to book length. And individual lines range from one word to whatever will fit on the page. Consequently, three or four lines can be 3 words or 70. And what about poems that aren’t lineated at all? Or visual poems? George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” is famously shaped like a pair of wings — if Herbert were alive today, could we quote a feather?

Nor does it help to say that the standard should be, say, 5 percent of a given poem. Here’s the entirety of Monica Youn’s poem “Ending”:

Freshwater stunned the beaches.

I could sleep.

What’s 5 percent of that? “Fr”?

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Andrew Wyeth, Love in the Afternoon, 1992
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Chet Baker

Friday Book Club - Deep in a Dream

[ed.  I haven't read this yet but plan on ordering it today.  Curious to see how it compares to Art Pepper's autobiography, Straight Life.]

by Greil Marcus, Barnes and Noble Review

James Gavin's book about Chet Baker, the jazz singer and trumpeter who first gained fame in the early fifties and who, only a few years later -- and for the rest of his life -- was better known as a heroin addict as unregenerate as any in the history of the music, was first published in 2002, fourteen years after Baker's death in Amsterdam, at fifty-eight, almost certainly by suicide; it has only now appeared in paperback. This long lag is hard to fathom. As evidenced most strikingly in the portraits of Baker in Geoff Dyer's 1995 "But Beautiful" and Dave Hickey's 1997 "Air Guitar," and in the response to Bruce Weber's 1988 documentary film "Let's Get Lost," released just after Baker's death, and screened in a restored version at the Cannes film festival only three years ago, there has always been a Chet Baker cult.

But more than that, "Deep in a Dream" -- named for a particularly affecting, cloudlike Baker recording from 1959 -- is not an ordinary biography, though there is nothing unusual about its form (from birth to death and aftermath) or style (direct and clear). It is a singular work of biographical art that makes most studies of, as Hickey's essay on Baker is so wonderfully titled, "A Life in the Arts," seem craven, compromised, or dishonest, with the writer falling back before the story he or she has chosen to tell, for whatever reasons offering excuses or blame in place of a frank embrace of the unresolved story each of us leaves behind, producing less any sort of real entry into the mysterious country of another person's life than a cover-up.

To put it another way: except in the rare cases of those strange creatures who, like T. E. Lawrence, create themselves to such a degree that it becomes nearly impossible to imagine that they ever experienced a trivial or even workaday moment, the dramatic sweep we find in novels or movies is not really the stuff of anyone's life. No matter how the writer may try to have it otherwise, most biographies are simply one thing after another. The life of a junkie is not just one thing after another, it is the same one thing after another -- and yet there is not a page in "Deep in a Dream" that is not engaging, alive, demanding a response from a reader whether that be a matter of horror or awe, making the reader almost complicit in whatever comes next, even when, with the story less that of a musician who used heroin to play than that of a junkie who played to get heroin, it seems certain that nothing can.

Born in Oklahoma in 1929, Chet Baker grew up in Los Angeles. He had a deep and instinctive ear for music, playing trumpet in high school, army, and junior college bands; in 1949, when he heard the Miles Davis 78s that would later be collected as "The Birth of the Cool," Baker "connected with that style so passionately that he felt he had found the light." That same year he was present at all-night sessions in L.A. to hear Charlie "Bird" Parker, and was shot up with heroin for the first time. He sat in with Dave Brubeck in San Francisco; in 1952 in L.A. he was called in with others to make up a group to back a wasted Parker.

That gave Baker an instant credibility in jazz. Ruined or not, Charlie Parker, with Dizzy Gillespie the progenitor of bebop, was the genius, the savant, the seer, the stumbling visionary who heard what others could not and could translate what he heard into a new language that others could immediately understand, even if they could never speak it themselves. If Parker said that Baker's playing was "pure and simple," that it reminded him of the Bix Beiderbecke records he heard growing up in Kansas City, that made the perhaps apocryphal story of Parker telling Gillespie and Davis, "There's a little white cat on the coast who's gonna eat you up" almost believable. But it was Baker's face -- as much or more than his joining in a new L.A. quartet with Gerry Mulligan, the baritone saxophonist and junkie who had played on the "Birth of the Cool" sessions, or Baker forming his own group and then headlining at Birdland in New York with Gillespie and Davis below him on the bill -- that made many people want to believe it.

Well before the end of his life, after he had lost most of his teeth in a drug-related beating in San Francisco, after he had turned into as charming, self-pitying, manipulative, professional a junkie as any in America or Europe, where for decades he made his living less as a musician than a legend, Baker wore the face of a lizard. In some photographs he barely looks human. But at the start he was, as so indelibly captured in William Claxton's famous photographs, not merely beautiful, not merely a California golden boy -- in the words of the television impresario and songwriter Steve Allen, someone who "started out as James Dean and ended up as Charles Manson." He was gorgeous, he seemed touched by an odd light, and he did not, even then, look altogether human -- but in a manner that was not repulsive but irresistibly alluring.

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image credit: last.fm

Linda Kim
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The Lairds of Learning

by George Monbiot

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the Western world? Whose monopolistic practices makes WalMart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.

Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a Keep Out sign on the gates.

You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges Eur34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read ten and you pay ten times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50.

Of course, you could go into the library (if it still exists). But they too have been hit by cosmic fees. The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792. Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I’ve seen, Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930. Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets, which means they have had to reduce the number of books they buy. Journal fees account for a significant component of universities’ costs, which are being passed to their students.

Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.

The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier’s operating-profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2 billion). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.

More importantly, universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can’t publish the same material. In many cases the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all. Perhaps it’s not surprising that one of the biggest crooks ever to have preyed upon the people of this country – Robert Maxwell – made much of his money through academic publishing.

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Photo: Creative Commons License - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

Feral Houses

Nothing I have ever done has resonated as much as the photos of what I called "feral houses" last summer. A quickly dashed-off blog post written while children tugged at my sleeves ended up capturing the attention of hundreds of thousands of people around the world and I still get hundreds of hits to that post every day. Even Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, e-mailed me about them. With a new summer here, I am tempted to add to the typology. Here we even have a feral church:

Living in Detroit, you can easily grow numb to the things that seem remarkable to people who live elsewhere. With so many journalists and photographers parachuting in over the past few years, we have allowed outsiders to document these things and define them. Detroiters are, after all, used to all the abandoned shit. We drive past the grand ruins without a second thought. It can also be easy to avoid the parts of the city where these "feral houses" are because there is little reason to go there: nature is taking them over because nothing else wants to be there. It is often easier to just travel the web of depressed freeways than it is to drive through depressing neighborhoods. But I'll always prefer a side road I've never seen to a rut I've been in a thousand times. Seeing these feral houses is a part of our daily life in this city, and I feel compelled to document them.

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Personalizing Your Hotel Search

by Michelle Higgins

Searching for a hotel online has long been limited to plugging in your travel dates and destination and then sifting through star ratings and prices. But there are other factors involved. Is the hotel in a convenient location? Is it child friendly? Will the room have a view of a brick wall or the sea?

Now, a number of Web sites are attempting to answer these questions with tools including photo-based searches and maps that show where a town’s hot spots are.
 
Google.com/Hotelfinder

Google’s experimental hotel search site, which started in July, focuses on where to stay and finding a good deal. After entering your destination, dates and price range, HotelFinder delivers its top recommendations (for cities within the United States) in a list or on a Google Map. A blue perimeter delineates the area, with less-popular zones shadowed in gray.

In addition to the current price of a hotel, the site offers the hotel’s historical average so you can tell if you are getting a deal or not. For example, a $144 nightly rate for the Latham Hotel in Washington in early September was 11 percent less than usual.

Clicking on a hotel brings up a collage of images, reviews by Google users and basic hotel information so you do not have to leave the page to do more research. You can also create a list of hotels you would like to compare further.
 
Best feature: You can redraw the perimeters on the map to narrow your search. So if you want to look at hotels only in, say, the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, you can manipulate the blue lines to home in on it.
 
Worst feature: The so-called “tourist spotlight” designed to shine a light on popular zones isn’t very enlightening. In a search for New York City hotels, for instance, practically all of Manhattan (with the exception of parts of Harlem and the Lower East Side, where few hotels are located) was highlighted.

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Computer Games Explore Social Issues

by Kara Platoni

Social studies teachers Karl Atkins and Scott Deckelmann take on a very serious subject by giving their students a very amusing challenge: Win a computer game. In fact, students have to win PeaceMaker, a simulation of the Middle East peace process, twice -- once while playing as the Israeli prime minister and once as the Palestinian president.

In both cases, students must respond to a rapidly evolving political situation by choosing which actions -- building settlements, launching rockets, making speeches -- are most likely to broker peace. The Scappoose, Oregon, teachers have played PeaceMaker with more than a dozen sections of their freshman global-studies and junior international-relations classes, and they say gaming is an effective way to explore intricate political issues. Indeed, PeaceMaker is at the forefront of a movement -- often called serious games or social-issues games -- in which educators use games to illustrate complex social issues, from immigration to climate change.

"Games are largely misunderstood in our society. They aren't necessarily trivial or sophomoric. Gaming is just a young medium," says Suzanne Seggerman, president and cofounder of Games for Change, a resource and support clearingouse for game developers, nonprofit organizations, and educators. "They're a great way for people to explore serious issues."

Better yet, they make that exploration fun, even addicting, according to Scapoose sophomore Ashley Amick, who played PeaceMaker at school last year. "I never wanted to go to my next class, because I hadn't won yet, and I wanted to see what would happen when I did," she explains. "We usually learn from textbooks or worksheets, but because you automatically learn while you play it, even my classmates that don't like school had fun." 

Modeling the Real World

Social issues are by their nature complex and dynamic. Understanding them involves analyzing cause and effect, multiple viewpoints, and rapidly shifting scenarios. Games easily mirror this fluidity.

"The thing we get with games that is different from what we get with books or other media is that we are able to actually build models of relationships between the different moving parts of a system and let people mess around with them, let people experience what happens when they change one variable or when they introduce a different kind of behavior," says Ian Bogost, an associate professor of computational and digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology. (Bogost is also an adviser to the Serious Games Summit at the annual Game Developers Conference, and he wrote the book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games.)

"Understanding something such as war or poverty or immigration demands understanding a whole range of different kinds of inputs and outputs," he adds. In other words, if you take an action in PeaceMaker, you'll soon find out what the other side thought of your input.

"It is very clearly active, not passive," says Deckelmann of the way his students use the game. "They are part of the game. They are helping determine the end of the story. They don't get to determine the end of a documentary. It's about them deciding what's important, as opposed to us telling them what is important. And it's allowing them to fail in a safe place where no one can shame them." Games teach almost entirely through trial and error, with few real-world consequences; if you mess up, you can always restart.

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Slavko Krunic Instructor
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Rick Lawrence, fairhaven 02

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Tamara de Lempica (1898-1980)
Succulent and Flask, 1941
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Are jobs obsolete?

[ed.  Interesting thought piece.  However, it seems whatever direction we take it will have to come from the intersection of capitalism and politics, and at this point that suggests anarchy rather than enlightenment.]

by Douglas Rushkoff

We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that's even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.

The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy, who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked. And so they invented the chartered monopoly. By law, small businesses in most major industries were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned corporations instead. From then on, for most of us, working came to mean getting a "job."

The Industrial Age was largely about making those jobs as menial and unskilled as possible. Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and laborers more replaceable. Now that we're in the digital age, we're using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.

While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, I have to wonder just how truly bad is it for people. Isn't this what all this technology was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with "career" be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.

The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised. The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.

But there might still be another possibility -- something we couldn't really imagine for ourselves until the digital era. As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.

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[ed. Update:  As a bookend, here's an interesting non-thought piece:  Rush Limbaugh on Doug Rushkoff.]

Sextortion

by Nate Anderson

In the spring of 2009, a college student named Amy received an instant message from someone claiming to know her. Certainly, the person knew something about her—he was able to supply details about what her bedroom looked like and he had, improbably, nude photos of Amy. He sent the photos to her and asked her to have "Web sex" with him.

Instead, Amy contacted her boyfriend Dave, who had been storing the naked photos on his own computer. (Note: victim names have been changed in this story). The two students exchanged instant messages about Amy's apparent stalker, trying to figure out what had happened. Soon after the exchange, each received a separate threat from the man. He knew what they had just chatted about, he warned, and they were not to take their story to anyone, including the police.

Amy, terrified by her stalker's eerie knowledge, contacted campus police. Officers were dispatched to her room, where they took down Amy's story and asked her questions about the incident. Soon after, Dave received more threats from the stalker because Amy had gone to the police—and the stalker knew exactly what she had said to them.

Small wonder that, when the FBI later interviewed Amy about the case, she was "visibly upset and shaking during parts of the interview and had to stop at points to control her emotions and stop herself from crying." So afraid was Amy for her own safety that she did not leave her dorm room for a full week after the threats.

As for Dave, he suffered increased fear, anxiety, confusion, and anger; he later told a court that even his parents "had a hard time trusting anyone or even feeling comfortable enough to use a computer" after the episode.

Due in large part to the stress of the attack, Dave and Amy broke up.

But who had the mysterious stalker been? And how did he have access both to the contents of Dave's computer and to private discussions with police that Amy conducted in the privacy of her own room?

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Toshiaki Kato, Rapunzel
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The King and I

by Ray Connolly

Elvis Presley changed my life. I’m old enough to admit it now. Actually he changed a lot of lives. That’s the point about him, the reason why we hear his name and see his face so often, why his record company still releases two or three albums of his songs every year, why his best work can still be given away with a newspaper looking for a sales boost, and why he is recognised by his first name as easily as anyone in the world. He’s been dead for 34 years, yet everyone knows about Elvis.

I first heard him in March 1956. I was 15, a schoolboy in a small town in Lancashire. He was like nothing on earth: nothing in my world, anyway. The word “teenage” barely existed. Once you were fully grown, you were expected to dress and talk and think like a younger version of your parents. In that austere, cautious, know-your-place moment, the sound of Elvis singing “Well, since my baby left me, well I’ve found a new place to dwell” struck like a lightning bolt. His voice was stark, ghostly, echoing. Paul McCartney still talks of that record, “Heartbreak Hotel”, as being musical “perfection”. Culturally it was something else—a birth cry, perhaps, although we didn’t yet know what was being born. Whatever it was, I was determined to be included.

“Heartbreak Hotel” was not the first rock hit in Britain. Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” had come out the previous year and started riots when it rang out in the film “Blackboard Jungle”, or so the papers said. Maybe, but not in the cinema I went to. “Rock Around the Clock” was sung by a pleasant, chubby, 30-year-old man with a chessboard jacket and a kiss curl who had stumbled on board a new trend. Entertaining as his Comets were, Haley’s music was beamed through a prism of early-onset middle age.

And then came Elvis, just 21, with his puppy-dog face, obscenely long hair for the time, and all the confidence of the idiot savant who had sucked in half a dozen musical styles, mixed them together and unwittingly created an idiom of his own. He even had a strange name: Elvis. We’d never heard of anyone called Elvis before. His detractors, which is to say just about everyone out of their teens, declared immediately that he was a flash in the pan who couldn’t sing.

It was more a case of them not being able to hear, because if Elvis could do nothing else he could sing—anything and everything. An untrained tenor with a pleading, urgent quality, he had an innate gift for musical communication. Over a billion records sold now attest to that. Before him, popular singers had been mainly bland and polished—variations on a theme of Perry Como, dressed in light-orchestral string arrangements. Elvis, backed by blue-collar, do-it-yourself instruments—guitar, bass and drums—sang with operatic emotion distilled through the blues artists he had heard on black radio stations in the South in the 1940s. His first musical ambition had been to join a gospel quartet: as a teenager in racially segregated Memphis, he stood in a visitors’ porch at a black church just to hear the singing. 

To an English boy who was just discovering John Steinbeck and William Faulkner, Elvis’s story was almost melodramatically romantic. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1935, he was a surviving twin whose stillborn brother had been buried in a cardboard box. When he was three, his father went to jail for doctoring and cashing a cheque from his landlord to pay for a pig. At 18, having never performed in public, he went into Sun Records in Memphis, a small company that did a sideline in private recordings, and paid $3.98 to make an acetate disc of “My Happiness”. Sun’s owner, Sam Phillips, saw his potential. Less than three years later, wearing sideboards which made him look like a trooper in the American civil war, Elvis was the most famous young man in the world.

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My Kailua

by Lawrence Downes

Walking to the beach with my family on a hot Kailua afternoon, let’s say 1972. My toy foam surfboard clip-clopping against my knees, towel scratching my neck, rubber slippers squeaking on steamy blacktop. Around the corner of Kuuala Street, across Kalaheo Avenue, then down the skinny beach path, hugging  a cinderblock wall under a thick, shady row of octopus trees and bougainvillea. Footfalls echoing on packed dirt.

Coming out onto Kailua Bay. A field of impossible blue, sky down to water. Squinting in the brilliance of the broad, white crescent beach.

My father swimming, in long, lazy lines parallel to shore. My mother sitting on the sand. Me, pondering the choices: sand castles or sand balls — wet double handfuls smooth-coated with dry sand into hard, sugar-dusted spheres; such a pity to have to whip one at your brother.

Kailua. The guidebooks say it’s basically a beach. But there’s a town wrapped around the beach, and, around that, a whole other side of the 600-square-mile island of Oahu — the windward side, a world away from Honolulu. Kailua is barely half an hour from downtown and Waikiki, but separated by a soaring ribbon of razorback mountains, the Koolau Range. The green lava wall is pierced near its summit by two sets of highway tunnels, like airlocks in time and space. The Honolulu side is dry and sunny, its postcard loveliness folded among high-rises, offices, airport and freeways. The Kailua side, where I grew up, is greener, quieter, lower and slower, with marshes and palms and that perfect bay.

The windward Oahu I know best is three communities: Kailua, Lanikai and their next-door country cousin, Waimanalo. They’re beachy but not snooty. Kailua has a downtown but no night life to speak of. It’s less a spot for touristic stimulation than a place you nestle into, as Hawaiian royalty once did, escaping dusty Honolulu since long before King Kamehameha’s day.

Two Beatles, John and George, mobbed in Waikiki, fled there once, in 1964. They were discovered, and so, eventually, was Kailua, although it and the rest of windward Oahu have managed to keep a reasonably low profile on Hawaii’s well-worn tourist map.

That may be changing, especially now that President Obama has claimed Kailua as his. He grew up in Honolulu, but Kailua is where he returns. This is his place called Hope, his San Clemente, his Texas hill country. Every winter the Obamas stay at the same rented house at one end of the crescent bay, whose waters he knows from boyhood, as he wrote in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father”:

“I still remember how, one early morning, hours before the sun rose, a Portuguese man to whom my grandfather had given a good deal on a sofa set took us out to spear fish off Kailua Bay. A gas lantern hung from the cabin on the small fishing boat as I watched men dive into inky-black waters, the beams of their flashlights glowing beneath the surface until they emerged with a large fish, iridescent and flopping at the end of one pole. Gramps told me its Hawaiian name, humu-humu-nuku-nuku-apuaa, which we repeated to each other the entire way home.”

In this story, either Gramps or young Barack was mistaken, since the humuhumu is a little reef fish, barely six inches long. But let’s give Gramps a break on his fish names, and allow Barack his childhood lens of magnified wonderment: Hawaiians do still fish here with spears and nets, often in darkness, and are done by dawn.

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Bernard Fleetwood-Walker (1893 - 1965) - “Amity”
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Adventures in Marketing

[ed.  I'd be pissed.]

by Andrew Adam Newman

In August, food bloggers and mom bloggers in New York were invited to dine at an underground restaurant in a West Village brownstone run, apparently, by George Duran, the chef who hosts the “Ultimate Cake Off” on TLC.

Sotto Terra, the invitation said, was “an intimate Italian restaurant” where attendees would enjoy a “delicious four-course meal,” Mr. Duran’s “one-of-a-kind sangria,” and learn about food trends from a food industry analyst, Phil Lempert. The invitation continued that upon confirming — for one of five evenings beginning Aug. 23 — bloggers would receive an extra pair of tickets as a prize for readers and that the dinner would include “an unexpected surprise.”

The surprise: rather than being prepared by the chef, the lasagna they were served was Three Meat and Four Cheese Lasagna by Marie Callender’s, a frozen line from ConAgra Foods. Hidden cameras at the dinners, which were orchestrated by the Ketchum public relations unit of the Omnicom Group, captured reactions to the lasagna and to the dessert, Razzleberry Pie, also from Marie Callender’s.

“Our intention was to really have a special evening in a special location with Chef George Duran,” said Stephanie Moritz, senior director of public relations and social media at ConAgra.

“The twist at the end was not dissimilar with what brands like Pizza Hut and Domino’s have done in the recent past with success,” she said, referring to hidden-camera advertising campaigns. ConAgra expected to use the footage for promotional videos on YouTube and its Web site, and for bloggers to generate buzz when they wrote about being pleasantly surprised.

But it was the marketers, not the diners, who were in for the biggest surprise.

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Kevin Chupik
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