Category: scott sforza, wh producer

Have I been reading too much David Foster Wallace, or would these Brazilian army riot shields make awesome venues for the right advertiser? [image via knuttz.net]

Come sparando pesci in un barilotto. Remember September 10th!

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Before he was the Mayor of 9/11, he was the Mayor of New York City.

If liberal bloggers start seeing The Gay Conspiracy everywhere, too, does that count as progress?
Because that’s the prevailing interpretation on Americablog for the Sforzian Backdrop of this Stephanopoulos-Bush interview [hot George-on-George action?]. That rainbow flag-looking thing hovering over Bush’s head is probably not a subliminal Big Tent signal to Gannon Republicans, though; considering the interview took place at Victory Junction, Kyle Petty’s NASCAR-themed camp for terminally ill conservative children.
It’s the hood of a rainbow-striped car, a trophy which was seized after all the other drivers formed a mob to run the flamboyantly homosexual driver Jeff Gordon out of town. Next on the list: Jimmy Dean’s sausage [sic].
[an even better explanation, and not just because it might actually be true: it’s a rainbow flag with the word pace on it, which is just like pace cars in NASCAR. What’re the odds? And apparently, it means “peace” in Italian, too, who knew?]
Bush uses gay rights flag as backdrop for ABC interview [americablog via man [heh.]]

From very early on, the media’s real problem in Iraq was not covering the success stories even when they were happening right in front of their faces. Take this glowing example from the heady, hopeful days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, where dedicated executive branch appointees worked tirelessly to rebuild Iraq in the White House’s own, Sforzian image:

As the occupation wore on, Senor became the most visible CPA official after Bremer. Clad in a suit, he held televised press briefings several times a week in the Convention Center. The briefing room was decorated by a White House image consultant, who was flown to Baghdad to specify the dimensions and location of the backdrop — a gold seal emblazoned with the words Coalition Provisional Authority. The consultant also had two big-screen plasma televisions affixed to the wall so Senor could play video clips. While other CPA officials waited months for equipment and staff to arrive from the United States, the press room’s needs were quickly met.

that’s an excerpt from former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, which kind of makes you yearn for the good old days of 2003. kinda sorta.

UPDATE: the video’s been removed from YouTube. Still shot via salon
Tom Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee ignored one of the cardinal rules of stage performance: never appear with animals or small children.
I don’t know what Reynolds was saying; I couldn’t stop watching the Sforzian Backdrop of squirming children. Also, I had the sound off. But I do know what he wasn’t talking about: anything about the Mark Foley scandal that might make the little ones uncomfortable. Which is exactly why he trotted them out to this press conference.

Reynolds Blames Hastert [youtube via tpm election central]

Ever since it was first revealed by, I believe, then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice during the 9/11 Commission hearings, I’ve been bugged [no pun] by Bush’s reaction to Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s threat, that he was “tired of swatting at flies.”
Or more precisely, I’ve been bothered by the wholesale acceptance of Rice’s interpretation of that remark, with an emphasis on the “swatting.” As CNN reported during the hearings, this swatting meant Bush wanted “demanded a more comprehensive strategy to attack the terrorist network.” [Commission member Bob Kerrey took some issue, asking what flies had the administration swatted? None. But that still left the underlying assumption stand.]
Now that Bob Woodward’s book reveals a previously undisclosed, urgent meeting that CIA director George Tenet and one of his analysts called with Rice on July 10th, 2001, where they discussed the imminent threat of attack in the US, isn’t it way past time to re-examine the “swatting at flies” brushoff and put the emphasis where it actually, originally belonged, on the “flies”?
Judged on the actions of his administration and his own words George W Bush considered Al Qaeda to be flies–not even mosquitoes, flies–nothing more than a nuisance and certainly not a threat. And when faced with imminent attack, they chose to ignore it. Or they chose to let it play out because they had, as Cheney said in another context, “other priorities.”

Condi Rice vs Bob Woodward: Let the Battle Begin [e&p via tpm]

There is actually discussion online that this photo has been Photoshopped and that GWB didn’t actually step on the flag during a photo-op visit to a September 11th memorial near the WTC Site.
Sorry, it’s very real. Reuters photos of the event show the flag mat [WTF??] pre-positioned precisely in front of the photographers’ position, a classic Sforzian composition, albeit one that went horribly wrong [as far as these things go.]
There are additional pictures of Laura Bush walking on the mat, and both of them standing on the flag. [Jason Reed/Reuters via Yahoo]

I remember reading some analysis of mob phonetapping transcripts, and the gangsters were constantly preoccupied with how closely they ressembled movie Mafiosi like The Godfather. The authenticity of Coppola’s creation had usurped the once-authentic originals who had inspired him and Puzo in the first place, putting a new cart before the horsehead before the cart.
That chicken/egg fiction/reality feedback loop comes to mind every time I see a photo-op in the 24-like [1] set of the National Counterterrorism Center, located between an elementary school and Tyson’s Corner, the DC area’s biggest malls.
[While the AP dutifully/quaintly, described the NCTC as being in “an undisclosed location in the Northern Virginia suburbs” in 2004 when their photographer somehow managed to score a preview tour of the “spy agency look,” the war on terror is apparently going well enough that White House operatives let a Reuters photographer shoot the address of the building during GWB’s pep talk/press event there last week.]
It’s great because from where I sit, the place only looks like that because someone decided they needed an authoritative, authentic-looking counterterrorism nerve center visual, a backdrop, as it were. Keyhole, the geo-information systems folks, smugly tout the prominent appearance of their software [“Notice anything familiar about the program shown on the large central display screen below?”] as if it were the ultimate promotional product placement [which, of course, it is for the Homeland Security Industrial Complex.]
The pure mediacentric function of the NCTC is highlighted by what’s missing–barricades, crowds-as-wallpaper, a dias–as much as what’s there–only boom mikes and a presidential rug to liven up those on-angle shots. And if there’s no wardrobe coordinator in the White House, then Bush must just know intuitively to wear brown or risk getting lost against the high-tech greys and the navy suited entourage.
It all makes me wonder how many more permanent Sforzian Backdrops there are out there. Besides, of course, the White House Press Office, assuming it’s still safe to reopen after the elections.

[1] I say 24 because other people say that. I don’t watch 24, so to me, NCTC looks like CSI LV HQ.
images: whitehouse.gov, reuters via yahoo

John McKinnon reports in the Wall Street Journal that the White House Press Room is getting a studio-sized makeover, including direct feed video capability and a video wall [as seen here at U2’s Zoo TV tour]:

“Both the planned video capabilities and Mr. Snow’s hiring appear to be part of a subtle but sweeping effort by administration officials to deliver their message directly to the public, particularly through video.”

Meanwhile, Newsweek is reporting [tree, forest, sound] that the renovation schedule was extended from one month to at least nine, and that the press is murmuring to itself that they may not ever get back into the White House at all.
Nothing like a sweeping administration effort to disempower and disintermediate the press to generate…hardly any reporting, criticism, or discussion at all so far.
White House Pressroom Gets A Makeover [wsj]
Extreme Makeover: The Briefing Room Edition [newsweek]

Looks like it’s Michele McNally, deputy photo editor for the New York Times’ turn to pooh-pooh reader questions this week:

Q. As the Times has reported on one occasion, the Bush administration has been singularly aggressive in shaping and staging angles of photographs possible to take of the president and other members of the administration. Herding the press into an enclosure from which only dynamic upward-angled shots of the president are possible, for example. or setting the president against the background of the brightly lit cathedral in New Orleans results in shots worthy of Leni Riefenstahl. Wouldn’t it be proper to either refuse to publish such manipulated shots, or run a note in the caption explaining the limits imposed on taking it? Since the manipulation is otherwise invisible to the reader, doesn’t the Times have a duty to inform readers about the behind the scenes shaping of such shots?

— Ellen Gruber Garvey, Brooklyn, N.Y.
A. Our photographers desperately try to get around that problem…

But seriously…about New Orleans. We spoke about the “presidential stagecraft” in this story.

She also insists that it’s illegal to photograph subways or bridges.
Does calling BS on this total dodge of the real, larger, ongoing issue by disingenuously focusing on the particulars of a single incident screw my chances of ever writing for the Times again?

Unbelievable. Aided only a 40-oz., and using only a reference-letter-seeking grad student as a nervous sounding board, Steven Heller turns out 5,000 words of derision for the “lackluster,” “atrocious” design of Sforzian Backdrops [“all the subtlety of a PowerPoint presentation for a financial-services company”], all without betraying the slightest clue about the how or why or what for behind them.
Seriously, the entire thing is about typefaces and dropshadows. Does he not recognize the television and cable news origins of the backdrops’ “style”? Does he not question for a second how well they might perform the multiple objectives they’re designed for? What their purposes might actually be? Who their intended audience is? What their effects or implications are when they’re published and broadcast? All of these questions have been widely researched, documented, and commented on–not just here, either, but by the creator of these graphics, Scott Sforza himself.
Someone is in need of a serious education in Google.
POTUS Typographicus: Appealing to the Baseline and George W’s Typographic Legacy [metropolis/aiga.org via designobserver]

It just takes one or two photos to remind you that long before there was a Scott Sforza, the British monarchy was using elaborately staged pomp and ceremony to bedazzle its subjects and keep them line.
On another note, whether you’re a believer in karmic justice or just simply confounded by the crazytalk coming out of Prince Philip’s piehole over the years, it’s good to remember what he does all day. [via wmmna]