a blind flaneur

JibJab is back with a new satirical video for the 2008 election — Time for Some Campaignin’. JibJab seemed to invent the Internet video mashup in 2004 with This Land!, which presaged YouTube by two years. Now JibJab has a YT channel and a commercial site. According to their YT profile:

Brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis founded JibJab in 1999 with a few thousand dollars worth of computer equipment, a dial-up Internet connection and a dream of building a global entertainment brand. In 2004, their election parody “This Land” spark an international sensation and was viewed more than 80 million times online. NASA even contacted the brothers to send a copy to the International Space Station! Since then, JibJab has premiered ten original productions on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and received coverage on every major news outlet. In 2004, Peter Jennings named the brothers “People of the Year.”

Robert S. Duncanson. Blue Hole, Little Miami River. 1851. Cincinnati Art Museum.

With the indulgence of the proprietor, Café Mouffe opens early this week for my birthday. Utah Phillips has been on my mind since his death in May. America lost a national treasure with his passing. Utah was an ardent, union organizer and raconteur of tall tales, and he wrote more songs than I ever realized. I’ve been singing a lot of them when working in the garden over the last few weeks.

I was fortunate to see several Utah Phillips shows in the 70s when Yellow Springs folk singer Pop Wagner toured with him. The performance clips featured here, recorded at the 2007 Strawberry Folk Festival in California, do a good job of capturing his uniqueblend of story and song. One blends into the other through eight segments:

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

Thanks to VeniceArtists for documenting this show, which may have been one of Utah’s last.The Midnight Special put together a fine Utah Phillips tribute on WFMT-Chicago on May 31 (broadcast nationally on June 27). The audio is no longer available, but you can see the playlist.

Encore: You have to hear Moose Turd Pie. Every devotee of camp cooking needs to know it by heart.

Café Mouffe has slipped into an irregular schedule for summer. Look for it on Friday afternoons or some enchanted evening. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

Composer David Morneau has concluded a heroic yearlong musical project. A doctoral candidate in composition at Ohio State., Morneau has been composing, producing, and blogging one 60-second piece of music daily for the past 12 months on a site called 60 X 365. He discussed the project yesterday on NPR Music:

“I kind of hit a creative block with a couple other projects I was working on at the time,” he says, “so I was looking for a way to try some new things, and also for a way to sort of develop a little more discipline in my composing life.”

Morneau’s 60-second compositions took all different forms. On “String Cheese,” he took the sampled strings from Apple’s GarageBand software program, and mixed that sound with the oft-sampled drum solo known as the Amen break.

“Some of them are just about making one sound last for a full minute, and seeing what that feels like and what that sounds like,” he says. “And then some of the other ones are really more about finding a way to build a miniature structure within the one minute.”

Not all the compositions are what everybody would think of as “music” either. On “Glassbreak,” he took the sound of breaking glass to fashion what he called “old-school musique concrete.”

“And I’m happy if people want to think of some things like that as sound art,” he says. “I used to be more concerned about that question, but now — you know, I like to work with all kinds of sounds, in sort of all different ways. And I, of course, think of it all as music, but I know that that’s kind of a hurdle for some people, and calling it sound art or some other term is fine.”

Morneau’s project naturally made me think of John Cage. Then I wondered what Mozart or Beethoven would have made of the blog medium.

In one of the most iconic images of the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese soldiers follow terrified children, including 9-year-old Kim Phuc (center) as they run down a road near Trang Bang after an aerial napalm attack on suspected Viet Cong hiding places. The date was June 8, 1972. President Richard Nixon once doubted the authenticity of the photo, which earned a Pulitzer Prize for AP photographer Nick Ut.

What happened to that little girl? Now 45, Kim Phuc lives in Toronto. She tells a powerful story about otherness and forgiveness today for NPR’s This I Believe:

It was a very difficult time for me when I went home from the hospital. Our house was destroyed; we lost everything and we just survived day by day.

Although I suffered from pain, itching and headaches all the time, the long hospital stay made me dream to become a doctor. But my studies were cut short by the local government. They wanted me as a symbol of the state. I could not go to school anymore.

The anger inside me was like a hatred as high as a mountain. I hated my life. I hated all people who were normal because I was not normal. I really wanted to die many times.

I spent my daytime in the library to read a lot of religious books to find a purpose for my life. One of the books that I read was the Holy Bible.

In Christmas 1982, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior. It was an amazing turning point in my life. God helped me to learn to forgive — the most difficult of all lessons. It didn’t happen in a day and it wasn’t easy. But I finally got it.

Forgiveness made me free from hatred. I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days but my heart is cleansed.

Napalm is very powerful but faith, forgiveness and love are much more powerful. We would not have war at all if everyone could learn how to live with true love, hope and forgiveness.

If that little girl in the picture can do it, ask yourself: Can you?

Amy Winehouse led the finale at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday celebration in London with the anti-apartheid anthem Free Nelson Mandela. The concert raised funds for Mandela’s HIV/Aids charity 46664, which was named after his prison number during the 27 years he spent behind bars for resisting South African apartheid.

As the Seattle Times described the event:

Will Smith charmed the crowd, Amy Winehouse wowed them just by showing up — but Nelson Mandela proved to be the biggest star of all at a concert Friday in honor of the South African statesman’s 90th birthday attended by more than 40,000 music fans in London’s Hyde Park. The concert came 20 years after a birthday concert for anti-apartheid activist Mandela while he was imprisoned in South Africa. He told Friday’s crowd that the previous concert made a big difference in his eventual release after 27 years behind bars and helped dismantle the racist system in the early 1990s.

Will Smith quoted singer Peter Gabriel as once saying: “If the world could only have one father, the man that we would choose to be our father would be Nelson Mandela.” Read more on BBC News; see more concert photos.

Encore: Read more about the song and listen to the 1988 concert version. See Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and first news conference in 1990.

Café Mouffe has slipped into an irregular schedule for summer. Look for it on Friday afternoons or some enchanted evening. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

Some of my happiest times have been spent in garden sheds, waiting for the rain to stop. I’m easily distracted by any assortment of well-oiled tools, and usually whoever took the trouble to build the shed was a pretty handy carpenter. So I was impressed to learn from the Kitchen Sisters that garden sheds become outdoor kitchens and neighborly front porches for “alottment” holders, as community gardeners are called, in London. The shed in the photo, courtesy of John Wilson (Plot 84F) of the South Croydon Allotment Society, looks positively palatial to me. In Russia it would be called a dacha; in Michigan, a deer camp.

According to NPR’s Hidden Kitchens:

Wedged between buildings, planted in abandoned open spaces and carved into hillsides, these community plots of open space began to be reserved for neighborhood cultivation with the industrialization of England in the 1860s, when rural people poured into the city.

The allotments started to flourish with Britain’s “Dig for Victory” movement of World War II, an effort to feed the starving population of London during the war. They are exploding today with the organic gardening and “good food” movements, and efforts to food self-sufficiency sweeping the country.

… Talking to people, one place kept coming up: Manor Garden Allotments, a small patch of land in the heart of working-class east London. It is more than 100 years old.

But the area has now been lost, at least temporarily. In October 2007, Manor Garden Allotments was bulldozed to make way for a path and landscaping for the 2010 Olympic Games. The 100 or so families growing food there have been moved to another site, but they are hoping to return after the games.

“You’d go past rambling old factories, down a little alleyway, behind the bus depot, lots of rubbish everywhere,” said Julie Sumner, a Manor allotment holder and organizer. But anyone opening a gate to see the River Lea, she said, would find a different scene.

“The slopes of the side of the river [were] covered with plum trees,” Sumner said.

She said the person who set up the Manor Garden Allotments in 1900 was an aristocrat named Major Arthur Villiers, who was a friend of Winston Churchill.

“He was so appalled by the treatment of working-class people during the First World War that he devoted his life to providing facilities for the poorest of the poor over in the East End. They built squash courts, swimming pools, cricket grounds.”

Villiers also saw a need for poor children to eat better food — and for their parents to grow it. Allotments were his answer.

“He always said to the people he gave the allotments to ‘these are going to be yours in perpetuity when I’m gone,’” Sumner said. Read more.

Hidden Kitchens series | Kitchen Sisters home page | More on London’s alottments

An auction house worker poses in front of Claude Monet’s ‘Le bassin aux nympheas.’ [Photo by Lefteris Pitarakis/AP/IHT]

One of Claude Monet’s late paintings of waterlilies, finished at a time when he had doubts about his ability to see the colors in his palette, sold at Christie’s auction last night for £40.92 million. “Le bassin aux nympheas” had not been seen in public for eighty years, according to the International Herald Tribune :

Dated 1919, the “Nymphéas” seen at Christie’s once belonged to the celebrated American collector Norton Simon before passing into the hands of the late Xenia and J. Irwin Miller of Columbus, Indiana, part of whose collection was consigned by their estate.

The aura surrounding the couple of art patrons, who displayed their works in a 1957 house that was one of the finest built by Eero Saarinen, undoubtedly enhanced the picture. So did the scarcity of these compositions by Monet, the greatest of which are now ensconced in museums. The appearance of the picture, never seen in public since a “Monet Memorial Exhibition” held at the Philadelphia Arts Club in 1927, caused a sensation among connoisseurs. This contributed in no mean measure to its performance on Tuesday, when the “Nymphéas” doubled the previous record for the artist set less than two months ago in the course of Christie’s New York sale on May 6, in which a view of the railway bridge at Argenteuil dating from 1873 brought $41.48 million.

Other records were set for Russian avant garde painters of the early 20th century:

A flower composition by Natalia Goncharova, done in 1912 in an Expressionist manner that sets it apart within her œuvre, rose to £5.52 million, beating by 10 percent the record established in June 2007 at Christie’s London for a figural scene in the folkloric style that she cultivated in 1909.

The biggest surprise among the Russian school paintings was caused by Vera Rockline whose name, while familiar to specialists, means little to the wider public. “The Card Players” painted in 1919 two years before the artist emigrated to France, betrays the influence of French Cubism and possibly that of Italian Futurist artists such as Gino Severini, but remains entirely original. At £2.05 million, more than five times the upper end of the estimate, it left far behind the previous auction record set earlier this month at Sotheby’s London when a reclining nude sold for £265,250.

“Does it sound like an old friend is gone?” That’s what George Carlin said about removing a compound matrilineal redundancy from his famously scandalous comedy routine, Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television. Thanks to Carlin and free speech champions like him, you can say those words on the Internet. If you are offended by them, or their compounds and derivatives, this blog probably isn’t your cup of tea.

My own sense of freedom got twisted once around Carlin’s seven words. Some volunteers who were reading a media law textbook for me felt squeamish saying them out loud in front of a tape recorder. I turned to family values for a solution and asked my ten-year-old son to read them to me. I tell the story in Whooping Cranes, Family Values, and the First Amendment.

I think of George Carlin as an American Rabelais — and not just because he used earthy language to tell fart jokes. His ear was acutely tuned to nuances of register in the American idiom, from the pompous to the seditious. He played irreverently in the fields of contradiction between sound and semantics. If language is the dynamic flux between forces centripetal (stabilizing) and centrifugal (de-stabilizing), as Mikhail Bakhtin would say, Carlin was a 100-centrifuge cascade.

Today’s NYT obituary gives Carlin the last word:

Scratch any cynic,and you’ll find a disappointed idealist…. I don’t have pet peeves….I have major, psychotic hatreds.”

I’ve listened to warblers countless times over four decades of birding, but I saw only a handful of them. As a kid I was fortunate to learn the warbler songs from two naturalists gifted with perfect pitch. Even then, when I had something like normal vision, seeing warblers was a fleeting,, neck-craning, treetop experience. Once as a volunteer for a natural history museum, I had the desultory job of collecting dead warblers at the foot of a television tower, a grim way to count them in the fall migration when theyt don’t sing. A dead bird in the hand isn’t much of a bird; give me two in the bush any day.

When I read the following report in ScienceNOW, my mind’s eye retrieved a vivid image of a Black-throated blue warbler (Dendroica caerulescens). I saw this bird one evening in April on my grandparents’ farm in the Hocking Hills. It perched in a Staghorn sumac that had not yet fully leafed. I watched it through wide-angle binoculars from the distance of a dozen feet. Did I breathe? I couldn’t have. Forty years later, I remember its startling colors illuminated by refracted light from the setting sun.

The sumac tree grew at the edge of the farm’s trash dump, where several generations of hard-scrabble hill folk had pitched their tin cans and patent medicine bottles. On my kitchen sink is a quarter-pint whiskey bottle unearthed from the same midden on the day my grandfather died. It holds several burnished Incan marigolds this morning. I go to the kitchen and hold it in my hand to summon the scene all over again: black-throated blue warbler with pale red sumac cones in the chilly Appalachian tin-can sunset.

The ScienceNOW story by Virginia Morell (18 June 2008) reports on an experimental study that adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that more is going on with bird song than the conventional attract a mate/defend a territory explanation:

Like all immigrants, young male songbirds arriving in the United States have to make some quick decisions, beginning with finding the best place to build a nest. A new study reveals that youngsters make their choices after eavesdropping on the songs of their elders. The results add to a growing body of research indicating that birds’ songs carry far more social information than scientists realize.

Finding the right nesting habitat is key to a songbird’s reproductive success, says Matthew Betts, a landscape ecologist at Oregon State University, Corvallis, and the lead author of the study. “Even 50% of experienced males will lose their chicks to predators,” he says, so it makes sense for birds to look for places with the most cover. Other studies have shown, however, that songbirds are drawn to areas where they see and hear their fellows nesting. Betts and colleagues suspected that house-hunting young male black-throated blue warblers (Dendroica caerulescens), who arrive in the States from Jamaica, cue in on the songs of their elders.

Successful warbler dads sing after their chicks have fledged, most likely to teach their songs to their offspring, says Betts. “But there could be another, unintentional message in their song: ‘Hey, I’ve reproduced,’ “–a clue that the older bird is sitting on prime nesting real estate.

To test that idea, Betts and his colleagues recorded males’ songs at nests with fledglings in good habitat: a 90-year-old forest in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. They then played the recordings at 18 sites with lousy warbler habitat: recently clear-cut forest. Young male warblers flying nearby heard the calls and apparently memorized the exact locations of the crummy locales. That’s where they settled the next spring, after migrating to the Caribbean for the winter. As the team reports online this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the birds were four times more likely to follow the cues of the songs than to choose a site based on their own observations. Eighty-three percent of the 23 first-time breeding males moved right in. “We were very surprised,” says Betts. “It was as if we’d attracted a spotted owl to a parking lot.”

“While public information is increasingly acknowledged as important” to how animals make decisions, says Mikko Makkonen, an ecologist at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, this is the first experimental study to show that the information can override what a bird sees. Indeed, notes Hanna Kokko, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, once males have made their poor choices based on “hearsay,” females follow them in. “It’s a cascade of mistaken information,” she says.

The report includes an audio clip of the Black-throated blue warbler’s song. NPR ran a story this week about How Birds Can Capture a Kid’s Imagination.

I’ve never heard this metric before, although the U.S. Federal Highway Administration tracks and publishes it every month. Maybe it will become a number everyone watches nervously, like the Dow-Jones average, the Body Mass Index, or the weekend movie box office gross. What we need is a comparable measure of monthly miles walked. Call it the Flaneur’s Index.

America’s bulimic driving binge was duly reported in France by AFP:

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Americans drove around 4.5 billion fewer miles in April compared with the same month last year, marking the lowest mileage clocked on US roads for the month since 2003, a report showed Thursday.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHA) said in its monthly report that the number of vehicle miles driven in the United States fell by 1.8 percent, to 245.9 billion, based on preliminary data from the state highway authorities across the United States.

The number of miles traveled in April 2003 was 239.7 billion, FHA data show.

The miles traveled on US roads rose from 132.7 billion miles in 1983 to a peak of 250.9 billion miles in 2004, according to the data on the FHA website.

Most years from 1983 to 2004, with the exception of April 1990 and 1991, when the United States was engaged in the Gulf War, the number of miles Americans drove rose by several billion miles.

But beginning in 2004, the number of miles Americans put in on the roads annually began falling between 100 and 300 million miles.

And this year, the fall accelerated sharply on a yearly comparison to 4.4 billion miles.

Observers surmise a possible link between the declining number of miles driven and rising US gasoline prices.

According to a report released in April 2004 by the Congressional Research Service, the average price for petrol in the United States during the summer of 2003 was 1.74 dollars per gallon (around 3.5 liters).

Today, gasoline prices across the United States are around 3.5 times higher, averaging more than four dollars per gallon.

Many thanks to Alex at augmented illusions for pointing me to Shnirele Perele by the Klezmatics. He writes:

I don’t like the “museum” approach to Klezmer music, and I think the Klezmatics are about the only band that can truly be called vessels of song for the present time. This clip is part of their European tour of a few years back and was recorded in Berlin. I’ve sung Shnirele Perele in sweat lodges as a first round song.

Alex’s blog has become a steady source of new and wondrous vessels of song for me. No radio station can match its eclecticism! Check out recent posts on chanson, the Mozart clarinet concerto, David Byrne playing the building, and — clearing the air — Diamanda Galás.

Encore: Mermaid Avenue was my point of entry into the Klezmatics. With lyrics by Woodie Guthrie, it’s an American flaneur’s anthem if ever there were one. Holy Ground is another Woody Guthrie lyric resurrected by the Klezmatics for their Grammy-winning Guthrie tribute, Wonder Wheel.

Café Mouffe has slipped into an irregular schedule for summer. Look for it on Friday afternoons or some enchanted evening. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

I miss making eye contact with others. I don’t necessarily miss seeing the range of human facial expressions. Over the years some have suggested that I am disadvantaged in business meetings because I cannot see nuanced body language. Maybe, maybe not. I’ve always trusted my ear to detect the infinite gradations of insincerity, disinterest, and manipulation. With what remains of my peripheral vision, I also see something of gestural, non-verbal communication, mainly its movement. I respond to it as I see it — peripherally. New research from the University of Toronto argues that facial expression such as wide-eyed fear evolved to enhance peripheral vision. Perhaps there is more going on with this vestigial mode of perception than otherwise meets the (focused) eye.

NPR did a radio story on the research, and Gisela Telis summarizes it in ScienceNOW:

Why do we wrinkle our noses in disgust or widen our eyes with fear? A new study shows that doing so might help keep us alive.

The idea that facial expressions confer a survival advantage was first posited, perhaps not surprisingly, by Charles Darwin. In 1872, 13 years after he published On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote a lesser-known tome, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In it, he observed that some human expressions occur across cultures and even in some other animals. He cited the wide-eyed gasp of surprise as an example. Darwin speculated that these emotional faces might serve a biological function, such as getting a good look at an enemy.

Darwin’s hypothesis went untested until 3 years ago, when cognitive neuroscientist Adam Anderson, graduate student Joshua Susskind, and their colleagues at the University of Toronto in Canada decided to apply new technology to the century-old idea. The researchers computer-generated a “classic” fear face: one with raised brows, popping eyes and flaring nostrils. They also mocked up a disgust face: the wrinkled nose, raised lip, and narrowed eyes familiar to anyone who’s smelled rotten eggs or stepped in something foul. The team then asked volunteers to mimic these faces while taking vision and breathing tests.

Emotional faces weren’t just for looks. The team found that a fearful visage improves peripheral vision, speeds up eye movement, and boosts air flow, potentially allowing a person to more quickly sense and respond to danger. Squinty, scrunched-up disgusted faces had the opposite effect, limiting vision and decreasing air flow, ostensibly to keep out substances that might be harmful to the eyes or lungs.

The findings, reported online this week in Nature Neuroscience, are “pretty radical,” says Anderson, because most research on expressions has focused on their function in communication, not their physiological or evolutionary underpinnings. “No one’s ever shown this in a scientific way,” adds neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps of New York University in New York City. “The best kind of study seems obvious on the one hand, but no one’s demonstrated it before,” says Kevin Ochsner, a cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia University. “This is one of those studies.”

About the image: A computer maps the muscle movements that accompany (clockwise, from top left) fear, disgust, sadness, and happiness. [Source: J. Susskind and A. Anderson, University of Toronto/Science Now]

While I’m waiting for kale to sprout in my garden, wondering impatiently whether it was penny-foolish to plant seed from a three-year-old packet, I take heart in this news story from ScienceNOW, written by Emma Gatti (12 June 2008):

Scientists have successfully grown a date palm from a 2000-year-old seed dug up from the Judean desert. That makes the seed, whose age has just been verified by radiocarbon dating, the oldest ever to germinate.

Once upon a time, the Dead Sea region was famous for its full-size, succulent dates. The fruits were renowned for their sweetness and for their use in treating respiratory problems and depression. Indeed, Judean dates represented Israel’s biggest export business 2000 years ago. But centuries of wars, invasions, and drought disrupted date cultivation, and by the time of the Crusades 800 years ago, the region’s vast date forests had disappeared.

In 1963, a team of archaeologists, excavating King Herod’s fortress in Masada, near the Dead Sea, discovered ancient date seeds beneath the rubble. They preserved the seeds in a room for more than 40 years, with the intent of studying them further, and recently, a team of botanists, agronomists, and biologists did just that. Led by Sarah Sallon, head of the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center in Jerusalem, the researchers decided to plant some of the date seeds as part of a project to regrow medicinal plants lost from the area.

There have been many claims of “ancient” seeds germinating but usually without well-accepted verification of the seeds’ ages. So Sallon’s team turned to radiocarbon dating, which measures the age of objects based on the decay rate of their carbon isotopes, to date two of the seeds to about 2110 and 1995 years old.

The researchers were unable to plant those seeds, because the dating process destroys the shell, but they did plant a third seed. That seed germinated after 8 weeks, similar to modern dates. After allowing the plant–nicknamed Methuselah after the oldest person in the Bible–to grow for 15 months, the scientists dated shell fragments clinging to rootlets from the seed and arrived at an age of about 1700 years. The researchers suspect that the original seed was closer to 2000 years old but that the carbon the plant incorporated as it grew skewed the calculations.

Sallon and colleagues, who report their findings tomorrow in Science, are currently conducting genetic analysis on the young plants to see whether they represent an extinct species. If so, Sallon says her team will try to reintroduce the plant to Israel. That could allow scientists to cross the ancient date with more modern varieties, in the hopes of creating palms more resistant to infection and drought, for example.

Palm expert William Baker of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in Richmond, U.K., agrees that the resurrected palm could be useful for conservation purposes. But he notes that only the female plant produces seeds, so the ancient seeds will have more value if they develop into female plants.

I remember the daisy ad. Anyone alive in 1964 has to remember. What I didn’t realize until the death of its creator, Tony Schwartz, is the fact that it was broadcast as a TV ad only once. After that, it was news. Then it became a legend.

I was nine years old. I wouldn’t admit to pulling petals off daisies, but I could identify with that little girl’s worried look in the ad’s freeze frame. Nuclear Armageddon was the everyday angst back then, the all-purpose paranoia supplanted only by terrorism and 9/11 when “everything changed.” I started paying attention to world news during the Cuban missle crisis. When I turned on the TV first thing on Saturday morning, eager for cartoons, I stared at the test pattern and waited patriotically for the reassurance, “This is a test, only a test…” I’d dutifully rehearsed the “duck and cover” bomb drill a hundred times before I got out of grade school. When Lyndon Johnson campaigned in Dayton in October 1964, my father put me on his shoulders and pressed through the surging crowd toward the President. Reaching over a Secret Service agent, I shook LBJ’s hand and thought, “No, this guy cares about kids. He won’t push the button and wipe us all out.” The daisy ad worked on me. Vietnam was just an exotic name on a map then, like Laos or Phnom Penh, Baghdad or Tehran.

Tony Schwartz is credited, or blamed, for creating TV’s first political attack ad. It was viral marketing, too, decades before that buzzword was invented. Here’s what the NYT obit says about it:

Of the thousands of television and radio advertisements on which Mr. Schwartz worked, none is as well known, or as controversial, as the so-called “daisy ad,” made for Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential campaign.

Produced by the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach in collaboration with Mr. Schwartz, the minutelong spot was broadcast on Sept. 7, 1964, during NBC’s “Monday Night at the Movies.” It showed a little girl in a meadow (in reality a Manhattan park), counting aloud as she plucks the petals from a daisy. Her voice dissolves into a man’s voice counting downward, followed by the image of an atomic blast. President Johnson’s voice is heard on the soundtrack:

“These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.” (The president’s speech deliberately invoked a line from “September 1, 1939,” a poem by W. H. Auden written at the outbreak of World War II.)

Though the name of Johnson’s opponent, Senator Barry M. Goldwater, was never mentioned, Goldwater’s campaign objected strenuously to the ad. So did many members of the public, Republicans and Democrats alike. The spot was pulled from the air after a single commercial, though it was soon repeated on news broadcasts. It had done its work: with its dire implications about Goldwater and nuclear responsibility, the daisy ad was credited with contributing to Johnson’s landslide victory at the polls in November. It was also credited with heralding the arrival of ferociously negative political advertising in the United States.

In interviews and on his Web site, tonyschwartz.org, Mr. Schwartz said he had created the daisy ad in its entirety, an account that was disputed by members of the Doyle Dane Bernbach team. (The ad was modeled directly on a radio commercial for nuclear disarmament that Mr. Schwartz had made for the United Nations in the early 1960s.) What is generally acknowledged is that Mr. Schwartz was responsible, at minimum, for the audio concept of the daisy ad — the child counting up, the man counting down, the explosion — and for producing the soundtrack.

Mr. Schwartz helped develop advertising campaigns for hundreds of political candidates, most of them Democrats, among them Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. (All made the trek to Mr. Schwartz’s home to be filmed.) He was also known for creating some of television’s earliest anti-smoking commercials.

… To the end of his career, Mr. Schwartz was often asked about the daisy ad. To the end of his career, he defended it.
“For many years, it’s been referred to as the beginning of negative commercials,” Mr. Schwartz said in an interview with MSNBC in 2000. “There was nothing negative about it. Frankly, I think it was the most positive commercial ever made.”

Media consultant Tony Schwartz died in New York June 15 at age 84. While he is best known for the legendary “daisy” TV ad that evoked nuclear madness in the 1964 Presidential election, I like to think of him as a flaneur who loved the ambient sounds of his city and knew how to play political hardball completely by ear. He was blind for a time in his youth, and it deepened his connection to the sounds around him. He was the first to use natural sound and real children’s voices in broadcast commercials. For all his success in television, he remained passionately committed to the medium of radio. “The best thing about radio,” he said on NPR, “is that people were born without earlids. You can’t close your ears to it.”

For the record, here is an extended excerpt from yesterday’s NYT obit:

“Media consultant” is barely adequate to describe Mr. Schwartz’s portfolio. In a career of more than half a century, he was an art director; advertising executive; urban folklorist (in one project, capturing the cacophony of New York streets on phonograph records); radio host; Broadway sound designer; college professor; media theorist; author; and maker of commercials for products, candidates and causes.

What was more, Mr. Schwartz, who had suffered from agoraphobia since the age of 13, accomplished most of these things entirely within his Manhattan home.

… In news articles and profiles, Mr. Schwartz was often described as an impassioned visionary and occasionally as a skilled trafficker in truisms with a talent for self-promotion. His work was likened — sometimes approvingly, sometimes not — to that of the media scholar Marshall McLuhan, a mentor and close friend. (He was also sometimes confused with the Tony Schwartz who was a co-author of memoirs by Michael D. Eisner and Donald Trump.)

But detractors and admirers alike praised Mr. Schwartz as a pioneer in putting sound to more effective use in television advertising. He was credited, for instance, with being the first to use real children’s voices in television commercials, beginning in the late 1950s. (Advertisers had considered young children too intractable to deliver lines on cue; theirs had traditionally been recorded by adult actresses trying to sound like children.)

Anthony Schwartz was born in Manhattan on Aug. 19, 1923. He was reared in New York City and Crompond, N.Y., near Peekskill. As a youth, he was a ham-radio operator and interested in visual art. At 16, he went blind for about six months as a result of an unspecified episode of “an emotional type,” as he told People magazine. His blindness strengthened his already deep connection to the auditory world.

Mr. Schwartz earned an undergraduate degree in graphic design from the Pratt Institute, followed by service during World War II as a civilian artist for the Navy. Afterward, he worked as an art director at ad agencies and later ran his own agency, the Wexton Company, which later became Solow/Wexton.

Mr. Schwartz bought his first wire recorder around this time. Slinging it heavily over a shoulder, he began to harvest the intoxicating sounds of the city: foghorns and folk singers; street vendors hawking their wares; a shoemaker plying his trade; a Central Park zookeeper waxing poetic on the care and feeding of lions; hundreds of taxi drivers; and a host of ordinary New Yorkers, just talking.

Mr. Schwartz also built an important archive of folk music, recording young artists like Harry Belafonte and the Weavers performing in his home. Through correspondence with other, far-flung audiophiles, he augmented his collection with their recordings of music from around the globe.

During the 1950s and afterward, Mr. Schwartz produced more than a dozen record albums, most for the Folkways label. Among them were “Sounds of My City”; “1, 2, 3 and a Zing, Zing, Zing,” featuring the songs and games of New York children; and “A Dog’s Life,” which captured the sounds in the first year in the life of a real dog. (Many of these recordings are available from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, folkways.si.edu.)

Because of his agoraphobia, Mr. Schwartz confined his fieldwork to his neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side. One result was the recording “New York 19” — the number denoted the district’s old postal zone — which documented the “music” Mr. Schwartz encountered there, from street performers to immigrant speech to a pneumatic drill singing its achingly familiar aria.

For 31 years, from 1945 to 1976, Mr. Schwartz was the producer and host of “Around New York,” a radio program on WNYC. He was also a sound designer for several Broadway plays.

Mr. Schwartz was a shrewd observer of mass communications, in particular advertising. The aim of advertising, Mr. Schwartz said, should not be to introduce viewers to new ideas, but rather to bring out ones that were already lurking subconsciously in the mind.

“The best political commercials are Rorschach patterns,” he wrote in his book “The Responsive Chord” (Anchor Press, 1973). “They do not tell the viewer anything. They surface his feelings and provide a context for him to express these feelings.”

Mr. Schwartz also wrote “Media: The Second God,” published by Random House in 1981. He taught media studies at several universities, including Fordham, Columbia, New York University and Harvard, using a variety of technologies to conduct classes from his home. He liked to say that he had delivered lectures to every continent but Antarctica, all without leaving the house.

… Among Mr. Schwartz’s most famous television ads is one he wrote and produced for the American Cancer Society; it was first broadcast in 1963, a year before the Surgeon General’s warning on the dangers of smoking was released. The ad showed two children dressing up in adult clothes. The announcer’s voice said, simply: “Children love to imitate their parents. Children learn by imitating their parents. Do you smoke cigarettes?”

He later produced an evocative television ad in which Patrick Reynolds, a grandson of the tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds, named the members of his family who had died of cancer, emphysema and heart disease.

Mr. Schwartz’s commercial clients included Coca-Cola (for which he created the well-known TV ad featuring a sumptuously sweating bottle with the sound of pouring liquid as the only audio element); American Express; Chrysler; Kodak; and Paine Webber, among many others.

In 2007, Mr. Schwartz’s entire body of work from 1947 to 1999 was acquired by the Library of Congress.