Culture

It was eleven months ago that I published the New Gatekeepers series. I'm still learning. Just last Friday, Elisa Cooper of Berkeley, CA, posted a comment informing me about the concept of rankism, and its supporting website, Breaking Ranks. The concept Rankism has been coined by Robert Fuller, a past Professor of Physics at Columbia and President of Oberlin College. He had come to realize that all of our old scourges of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry had a common root-- an -ism called rankism-- but it was not until he left academia that the idea coalesced. He told Publishers Weekly: "Lacking the protection of title and status in the years after Oberlin, I experienced what it's like to be taken for a nobody."

The current movie Good Night and Good Luck, about Edward R. Murrow and directed by George Clooney, has been co-produced by a group called Participant Productions. They got a good head start with setting up companion websites (using the Drupal software, no less) for their films (which also include Syriana, Murderball, and North Country), but these are mere baby steps. If they want to have an activist mission, they must have an educational mission first. And it would also be best of them to avoid the scattershot "blog" approach and instead adopt a constructive media approach. Here's my review that I also posted on their site.

While the podcast medium has not ushered in much of a revolution so far-- downloadable audio files have been around for years now, and their marriage with RSS has not made it that much easier to skim them, as it has for bloggus bloviatus, the common blog-- there is one use where the aspect where podcasters make a brilliant use of the format.

I'll be doing the American Lung Association Asthma walk on the Charles River in two weeks, and I've joined team Sánchez. For a couple of simple reasons. One, my Dad has suffered from an asthma-like condition. The more direct reason is that Rep.

• Friends of the Boston's Homeless Benefit at Avalon: $20
• coatcheck, 2 coats: $6 (+$1 tip)
• Two drinks, $14 (+$2 tip)
• Winning the silent auction for two tickets to Swan Lake: $140 (anything to avoid ticketmaster charges)
• Taking in Jonathan Soroff's presence for 5 minutes, for the second time in a week: cliche.

Next time we'll show up early. Jamie and I missed the dinner (which only would have set us back another $30), missed the Mayor, missed meeting any new people, and missed much of Kendrick Oliver's band playing-- they played one song in the third set. The crowd really thinned out after the dinner; I haver never seen Avalon so empty. And once again, I get that feeling of winning a fundraising contest in weak competition. It would have been nice to learn more about the organizations my money went to. I hope I have the courage to look a homeless person in the face now.