Glenn Kubish

It's the end of another week of staggering carnage in the greater world and of small happinesses and gratitudes in my little one. Here's the Three Things podcast, episode 63 . 1. Eyes and ears March madness is on bloody and terrifying display in Ukraine. In that arena are two colleagues, doing work for good. I admire them both. Tim, who is a videographer, is on professional assignment for the national news. Jerry, who was a reporter, is on a personal mission. Both are doing what journalists do, which is to use the least private of the human senses—sight and sound—to convey something that is out there, an objective world. “This is such an important story to tell,” Tim said in a message. “So important to hear the voices from the people here. It’s heartbreaking.” For his part, Jerry booked three weeks off work and headed 8,000 km for the Ukraine border. “I’m really here just to grow and learn as a person in no official capacity,” he said, adding that that has meant “carrying lugga...

Aaron Brown wasn't sure who was in his ear. "We have, um, one of our producers on the phone, and I didn't get the name, so, why don't we just go ahead," said Brown as he anchored live coverage of the World Trade Center attacks. "Are you there?" Brown's ear had in it what in the television news game is called an IFB. IFB stands for interruptible foldback. It's a kind of earpiece that delivers a one-way audio feed into the head of the TV reporter. It is a medium used to deliver cues and information to the reporter from the TV control room. If you've ever seen a live reporter touch or motion to her or his ear to get a better handle on the incoming information, you have seen an IFB at work. That second, Brown, as one of the Twin Towers still stood behind him like giant chimney emitting smoke from hell, was in silent contact via IFB with the CNN control room. Someone, the director, a producer, maybe, was telling him that another produ...

There is a thing that happens, and it needs a word, and that nameless thing is what happens when two pieces of media intersect perfectly in an instant in the same person. Like this morning at 9:19 am. On my phone I was reading LeBron's explanation for why he hasn't spoken out about the Tamir Rice case. Rice is (I paused for a second over that "is" given that he is dead and so should the verb be "was?" But the record of people stay with us longer and in intriguingly real ways these days, so "is" it is ) the forever 12-year-old boy killed by Cleveland police who had thought his gun, a toy replica without the orange safety tip, was real. Earlier this week, a grand jury declined to indict the white police officer who pulled the trigger on the black youngster. The ESPN article explained that LeBron did make a public stand in the deaths of Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown. And in the case of Eric Garner, killed in a confrontation with New York pol...

I got up and to the kitchen by 6:26 am this morning. It's now 6:48 am. What have I accomplished so far? Well, I don't know how much I have actually accomplished, but it is interesting to watch what I consume before breakfast. First job was to fire up the laptop and check Gmail, where there was a message from Shelagh, then sitting across the table from me, waiting. It was a link to a short video titled Danny MacAskill vs. San Francisco. Very cool, even if he shouldn't have blown through the intersection when there was a pedestrian in it. But, then again, I don't know who's got the right of way in SFO! Interesting that Remington would sponsor the video. Neat sound off the top. Then, put some tea on. While the kettle was  heating, it was back to the laptop where I learned from a quick Facebook check that Susan Hennig and Corey McDonald liked my post to the CTV Edmonton FB page about a recent Paralympic blog post. Then, a quick check of the blog readers...

Tonight, I have been watching a remarkable story unfold on Twitter. Here's the end of it in a retweet from Clay Shirky:  Clay Shirky  ‏ @ cshirky We did it!  @ HomicideWatch  crosses $40K in funding, will keep covering murders in DC. Thanks and congrats to everyone who pitched in! This is a deduction from afar, but the beginning of the story must have been a decision by the conventional media in Washington, DC, to stop covering every homicide in their community. Maybe there were just too many murders and there was an opportunity cost to covering them. Maybe there was research suggesting that readers stopped reading and viewers stopped viewing when they were asked to consume the facts and images of murder scenes. Maybe the chamber of commerce logic won the day, and editors were convinced of the argument that bad news was bad business. Maybe the advertisers couldn't sell as much happiness when the reality outside the door was so different and so sad.  ...

I have said it before in this blog, but it bears repeating, and that's that sound, according to Ong, "exists only when it is going out of existence." Here is the rest of the quotation from Orality and Literacy : "[Sound} is not simply perishable, but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent. When I pronounce the word 'permanence', by the time I get to the '-pence', [sic] the 'perma'- is gone, and has to be gone.... All sensation takes place in time, but no other sensory field totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in quite this way."  The notion of secondary orality means much more than the strand of thought with which I cling to it. But it makes sense to me that there is something essentially oral, fleeting, evanescent, about the text and pic-based media in which we now move. (I thank my MACT professor, Gordon Gow, and my boss, Peggy Garritty, for pointing me and keeping me in this interesting direction...