Category Archives: Media & Culture

“What Makes A Cult A Cult?”

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It’s a little surprising how many cults I’ve seen come and go over the years. Heaven’s Gate, Branch Davidians, Peoples Temple, Aleph (formerly Aum Shinrikyo), Moonies. And let’s not forget Scientology. Yes, most of the members considered these religious sects. But who you gonna believe, me or some guy in a cult?

A fascinating essay in The New Yorker Magazine (What Makes A Cult A Cult?) got me thinking about cults. A few of my favorite bits from the piece:

“One stratagem favored by Keith Raniere, the leader of the New York-based self-help cult NXIVM, was to tell the female disciples in his inner circle that they had been high-ranking Nazis in their former lives, and that having yogic sex with him was a way to shift the residual bad energy lurking in their systems.”

“A great many people were, after all, able to resist his spiral-eyed ministrations: they met him, saw a sinister little twerp with a center part who insisted on being addressed as “Vanguard,” and, sooner or later, walked away.”

“Few of us believe in our heart of hearts that Amy Carlson, the recently deceased leader of the Colorado-based Love Has Won cult, who claimed to have birthed the whole of creation and to have been, in a previous life, a daughter of Donald Trump, could put us under her spell.”

Easy to laugh at these folks but they were never funny (and getting less so). Down in Jonestown, old Jim sometimes conducted “White Nights.”

During such events, Jones would sometimes give the Jonestown members four options: attempt to flee to the Soviet Union, commit “revolutionary suicide”, stay in Jonestown and fight the purported attackers, or flee into the jungle.

The Soviet Union is no more so I’m thinking I might flee into the jungle.

Are we ever “offline” now?

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I used to think about what it means to “be online.” I still recall when everything was off-line. Or pre-line.

Before social media and the primacy of the latest post — and the irrelevance of all previous posts — I thought of my websites, especially my blog, like a small town library. You kept everything you thought you (or someone) might want to retrieve and read again. I didn’t care much how infrequently a “book” was checked out, just that it was there on a shelf and in the card catalog.

But now the ever-flowing river of Tweets, Toots, FB posts, etc. makes anything below the scroll worthless. The notion of “rebooting” one’s online presence made me think of moving that small town library to a new building on the other side of town.

Sarah Cooper

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One of the few bright spots of the last 8 months is Sarah Cooper and her brilliant videos. Nice piece in the Washington Post.

In a medium where teenage gamers become instant multimillionaires, Cooper is the strangest kind of overnight star. She has earned a master’s degree, written three books and developed more than a casual understanding of John Maynard Keynes. She was in her 30s before she did her first standup set, and spent the bulk of her adult life working at tech companies, most recently Google, where she led the team that redesigned the company’s popular word-processing program, Google Docs.

Gotta say it… I’m impressed by the Google Docs thing. She went from doing gigs in a pizza place in January to a Netflix special on October 27.

It is not your standard Netflix comedy show. For one thing, “Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine” is not standup. The special is a darkly hilarious and political sketch show filmed on the covid-claustrophobic set of a fictitious morning program hosted by a needy and desperately cheery character named Sarah Cooper.

If you’ve been living in a cave (or watching nothing but Fox News) you can check out her work on YouTube.

When online video was hard

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Everywhere you look people are streaming live video. TV news programs, late night talk shows, online classes, grandmothers Zooming with their grandkids. It has never been easier to “video chat” with someone. But it wasn’t always this way. Here are a few of my memories from the early days. (6 min)

Turbo Encabulator

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YouTube notes: “This is the first time Turbo Encabulator was recorded with picture. I shot this in the late 70’s at Regan Studios in Detroit on 16mm film. The narrator and writer is Bud Haggert. He was the top voice-over talent on technical films. He wrote the script because he rarely understood the technical copy he was asked to read and felt he shouldn’t be alone. We had just finished a production for GMC Trucks and Bud asked since this was the perfect setting could we film his Turbo Encabulator script. He was using an audio prompter referred to as “the ear”. He was actually the pioneer of the ear. He was to deliver a live speech without a prompter. After struggling in his hotel room trying to commit to memory he went to plan B. He recorded it to a large Wollensak reel to reel recorder and placed it in the bottom of the podium. With a wired earplug he used it for the speech and the “ear” was invented. Today every on-camera spokesperson uses a variation of Bud’s innovation. Dave Rondot (me) was the director and John Choate was the DP on this production. The first laugh at the end is mine. My hat’s off to Bud a true talent.”

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