Tag: Jon Stewart

Bang Bang Shoot Post

On May 8, 2012

Do you use Instagram? Do you love it? Hate it?

There’s been a lot of talk about the mobile app recently. A reporter friend sung its wonders last summer; her prescient enthusiasm anticipated Instagram’s huge dent in public consciousness over the last few months. The mobile app was bought by Facebook for a big price tag; it was the subject of Jon Stewart’s acerbic wit; it’s been featured on the PBS Idea Channel (above); it’s inspired a snarky (and very funny) parody video of its features; it’s even made the pages of the Grey Old Lady. Oh, and I recently did a feature on a prolific (and dedicated) IG user. What’s the big deal?

Part of it seems to be the temporal nature of the app; it captures moments within a certain frame of time, with filters reflecting users’ moods and visual ideas around events. It’s temporal, with a leaning toward the personal, taking the best bits of social media and putting them within a visual interface. Thus, it’s become a beautiful complement to reporters’ toolkits. For evidence, check out WSJ’s impressive collection of Occupy Wall Street Instagram shots. Photojournalist Richard Koci Hernandez sees it as a game-changer. It was used for New York Fashion Week. Plenty of people – journalists and non-journalists alike – use it as a kind of blogging shorthand for what they see around them. Plenty don’t, however, and in a neat twist of irony, they’ve used other social media outlets (particularly Twitter) to air their displeasure. Is Instagram a threat to traditional photojournalists? To journalists overall?

The line between reporting and art feels perilously thin when considering the potential of the app. I happen to like it for on-the-go shots of my daily life, though I’m careful to avoid the “this is what I ate for breakfast” mundanity that seems to dominate so much social media photo-sharing. As a former photographer who worked in (and occasionally misses) film, I find Instagram’s range of “vintage” filters more amusing than annoying. Still, there’s something to be said for the tactile, and more than once, I’ve found myself drawing (or wanting to draw) some of the shots I come across on my daily Instagram look-throughs. Perhaps that’s the basic beauty of the app: it embraces the sharp, thorny terrain of the present, while snuggling with the soft, messy sheets of yesteryear. It’s Now, and Then, and Maybe, all at once.

Funnies

By Catherine Kustanczy

On September 19, 2011

In Non-Classical Writing, popular culture, television

It’s an old adage but it’s true: when you can’t cry, you have to laugh.

The last few weeks have brought a myriad of mixed feelings and reactions at being back in Canada. Joy, because of proximity to things fuzzy and familiar, relief at being near an ill family member, and sadness at being away from a place I feel at home in. There have also been liberal dollops of self-pity, confusion, and a keenly gnawing restlessness. Questions surrounding worth, direction, relationships with artistry, family, and community, and a larger, more silent quest for meaning amidst the madness. Dear Mid-Life Crisis, you’re early by a decade.

The best part of these days have been the nights -and no, not because I’ve developed a taste for seedy bars or taken on a profession involving garment-shedding (yet). The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have become the colorful, leaping Castor and Pollux of my moping, grey-hued psyche. Watching the Emmy Awards lastnight, I was struck by the role the programs, and in a larger sense, comedy itself, has played in my life the last few years. If it’s true that laughing at the devil makes him flee, it’s equally true that humor puts pain (be it physical, emotional, spiritual, or all three) into the Magic Bullet of human experience; laughter gets mixed up with all those other very un-fun ingredients, resulting in a gooey concoction called Hilariously Tolerable, also known as Smiling Feels Good, also known as I-Can’t-Go-On; I’ll-Go-On, a phrase Sam Beckett knew a thing or two about.

Once upon a time I loved physical, old-timey comedy with a sharp edge of commentary. As a teenager, I had stacks of VHS tapes of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, and later, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. I was an avid watcher of Conan O’Brien in his first incarnation on NBC, and I used to howl away many a late night as he brought out Heavy Metal Inappropriate Guy, the Masturbating Bear, and Andy’s Little Sister Stacy (a young Amy Poehler, who made such an impression that to this day I can’t look at her without remember how she looked with braces, spitting out “I love you!” to an awkward, creeped-out Conan). I also adored the Saturday Night Live era of Wayne’s World, Sprockets, and Tales of Ribaldry. Weekend Update With Dennis Miller was my first real introduction to the world of timely-commentary-meets-comedy.

Having turned into a verifiable newshound over the last few years, my taste for newsy comedy has grown, but I’ve never quite abandoned my long-standing love of the absurd, either. I didn’t pay much mind to The Daily Show or The Colbert Report until I was forced to face the the steaming pile of ugly adulthood presents. Suddenly, jokes about stuff on the news made a whole lot more sense. After 9/11 especially, this kind of humor became a necessity for me -and, I suspect for many like me. Nothing made sense except comedy.

Watching the Emmys lastnight, I realized just how aware the TDS & TCR teams are of their collective role: to make us pie-eyed schleps smile. That is no small task. At the end of everyone’s crappy/annoying/busy (or wondrous/lovely/easy-peasy) day, we want to turn on the telly and see someone make funny about all the bad stuff in the world and in their every day lives. There’s a relief in that -a kind of tonic to the bad forces at work, the stuff you and I feel we can’t control -that someone is there to say, yes, it sucks, but here, we’re going to give you a side of Marshmallow Fluff with your soft graham crackers. Stuff like wars, political corruption, media incompetence on a macro level, and cancer, chemotherapy, and confusion on a micro one (if there’s such a thing as those first two even existing in micro terms) gets shrunk down to bite-sized pieces. We want it. We like it. We want more.

So I believe Jon Stewart when he says (insists) that his role is, first and foremost, to make people laugh. It’s hard. The world’s a pretty crappy place. We all know that. But it’s heartening to know that he and Stephen Colbert make it just a bit brighter for some of us four night a week. Things frequently don’t make sense in life, but if there’s one thing I consistently take away from these programs, it’s that there’s a joy at work in the world, one that feeds on not putting anything in place, but in finding the right angles to point at the chaos and shriek, THIS IS NUTS, funny faces in place, absurd narrative in play. To The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, I say: thank you x a billion, and, I owe you each a large tray of cookies. Marshmallow Fluff on top, if you really want it.

Pondering Pakistan

By Catherine Kustanczy

On May 10, 2011

In writing

For a long time now I’ve wanted to write about my interview with Duane Baughman and Mark Siegel. The two men were in Toronto this time last year for the screening of their film, Bhutto, at the annual Hot Docs Film Festival, following their world premiere months earlier at the Sundance Film Festival. The Toronto screening came and went, life moved on, and I never seemed to properly make time to sit down and write – until now.

I visited Ground Zero last week, less than 12 hours after President Obama’s historic announcement about Osama bin Laden’s death. With news reports filled with pertinent details and reports that paint a damning portrait of Pakistan and its possible role in harboring terrorists (or not), the screening of Bhutto tonight feels like a slow, patient untying of a complex Gordian knot. That’s not to say the movie is slow -it isn’t – but it is layered, the way any documentary worth its salt should be.

I discussed this in my chat with Duane and Mark last year on the radio:

Independent Lens is broadcasting the timely documentary tonight on local PBS stations (check yours here). Baughman, its Director, and Siegel, Co-Producer, present a complex, if deeply vital portrait of both a woman and a country that we, here in the West, have a lot of preconceptions around -especially since the news of Osama bin Laden being killed May 1st.

With numerous interviews (including fascinating input from The New York Times’ John Burns and vitriolic assertions from Fatima Bhutto, Benazir’s niece), fly-on-the-wall footage, and a thorough, if compelling history lesson (not to mention a pulsating soundtrack by The Police’s Stewart Copeland), Bhutto is a riveting look at a country that’s been painted in far too broad strokes by a Western media eager for villains. Truth be told, there are no clear villains in Bhutto, but (hint hint) General Pervez Musharraf doesn’t come off very well; he visibly squirms, as the camera casually lingers on him, providing glib answers and a ton of silence. The effect is awkward, as it’s meant to be, though his inclusion in the documentary might seem questionable. In fact, when Siegel was on The Daily Show just months after Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West came out (a book he co-authored with Benazhir Bhutto), he took host Jon Stewart to task for having the former Pakistani leader as a featured guest. Siegel had just finished working with long-time friend Bhutto on Reconciliation when she was assassinated. “She prayed for the best and planned for the worst”…

Even if you still have questions around Benazir Bhutto and her approach to Islam, her handling of government policy, and those troubling corruption charges, you will most certainly come away with a more thorough, nuanced understanding of the machinations of politics and terrorism, and the place where the two meet, in one tragic explosive moment. Watch it. You’ll be glad you did.

Angry Magic

By Catherine Kustanczy

On April 28, 2010

In opera

Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre has remounted its hit production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. It’s running at the beautiful Young Centre in the Distillery District through June 5th.

In prepping for my live radio interview with actor Jordan Pettle last week (he plays tough nut office manager John Williamson), I returned to my review of last year’s production. Shock and awe aside (“I wrote that?! No, really… I wrote that???”), I was struck by how much had changed, and how much had stayed the same in this year’s version. The chemistry between the six cast members is as pungently male as ever, its energy as snappy and smart as the salty dialogue. Director David Storch has the performers -Eric Peterson, Albert Schultz, Kevin Bundy, William Webster, Peter Donaldson, and Pettle -play, literally and figuratively, with their own energies, reactions, and relationships with one another. Most noticeable in this year’s revival is the sheer physicality on display; chests and chins jut forwards like prize fighters daring their smarmy mugs for a loud, proud shiner. Spit flies around with as much aplomb as big promises and dead contracts.

There’s a kind of manic, angry magic at work here; between Ken MacDonald’s sexy, shiny design and _’s slithering sound design, a kinetic energy comes sparking from the stage, full-throttle. It’s exhilerating, exhausting, and ultimately enlightening. Jon Stewart and his gaggle of writers are equally foul, fierce, and funny about financial ruin -in a way, they’re Mamet Circa 2010, with every ounce of anger, wit, and that alchemical transformation that happens in the arena of performance; a kind of magical inversion of “reality” happens, with equal gasps and guffaws bouncing off sets, sofas and stages. There’s something so powerful about the mix of funny and angry -it makes the underlying rage all the more bitter, and strangely, cathartic.

Storch nicely captures this magical combination. You’ll leave wanting to either jog a twenty-mile marathon, or take a long, hot shower. Maybe both. Whatever you do, channel that energy into something positive that doesn’t involve selling bad stocks or properties in Florida.