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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2013-12-19, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2013. PAGE 5. Can I tell you about my career as a photojournalist? Won’t take long because it didn’t last long – about 11 seconds, as I recall. I had the equipment – a nice 35-millimetre Pentax. I had the location – a mountain village in rural Spain. I had a customer – The Globe and Mail was buying travel pieces from me. I even had the occasion. Generalissimo Francisco Franco had just croaked and I had a chance to record what the passing of the long- time dictator meant to at least some of his countrymen. I decided a photograph of one of the townspeople – a barefoot peasant in a battered straw hat who was astride a burro shambling down a rocky path toward me – would make a compelling illustration for my story. I raised my camera; the peasant raised his right forefinger and wagged it disapprovingly. And I caved. I baled. I chickened out. I lowered my camera and grinned apologetically. Clearly I wasn’t tough enough to be a photojournalist. Back then, attitudes towards photos taken without permission were a good deal crisper than they are today. In 2013 we all have our pictures taken by complete strangers dozens of times daily. Surveillance cameras snap our profiles in bank lineups, corner stores, at gas pumps – even at stoplights. It is a completely unwarranted and unsanctioned intrusion of our privacy but it happens so often we don’t even think about it. My computer guru was helping me retrieve some files on my laptop and I happened to mention that tiny Cyclopean eye that sits front and centre on most laptop screens – the camera lens. He chuckled and said “I can’t tell you how many clients I deal with who’ve put duct tape over that lens.” Meaning what? That some people think their own computers are spying on them? What would be the point? What would a spy see through that lens? In my case he’d see a bald guy with a red face saying bad words about the laptop that just ate his e-mail. Hard to see how that would enhance the CSIS database of terrorist activity in Canada. I’m saying CSIS but choose your own initials? CSA, FBI, CIA, RCMP – who knows who’s snooping out there? Recently I attended an anti-oil tanker rally in a local park. I was having a hard time hearing the Raging Grannies because of a high-pitched droning sound from overhead. I looked up and saw...a drone, I guess. A weird gizmo about the size of a crow with four stiff wings that swept back and forth about 20 feet above the crowd. It wasn’t camouflaged; as a matter of fact it looked sort of like a model airplane – except every few seconds it would stop and hover. The better to take photographs, I have to conclude. So who was manning the controls on that drone – the protest organizers? Some municipal crowd control bureaucrat? A constable from the local RCMP unit? All I know is, nobody identified themselves. And nobody asked my permission. Well I know something else. The next time I pass a surveillance camera – at the bank, at the gas pump, wherever – I plan to emulate that Spanish peasant who held up his forefinger to me years ago. But I’ll be using a different finger. Arthur Black Other Views Photojournalist interrupted Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Once upon a time I laughed at circumstances of censorship, especially those that plagued PG-13 movies played on cable channels. I’m sure some readers know what I’m talking about. One of the best examples I can think of is Bruce Willis’ John McClane character in the Die Hard Trilogy... er anthology I guess would be a better term now. McClane’s famous line of yippee-kay-yay mother... while, I can’t type the rest of it due to censorship, but rest assured, it’s just as vulgar as it could be. Now, I’m not saying swear words shouldn’t be beeped out on television or in songs on the radio. What I am going to say, however, is that beeping is far preferable to the alternative; dubbing over. McClane’s famous line is now infamous because of a horrible dub done to cover up the swear word. It is now known as yippee ki-yay Mister Falcon. Weird Science (and yeah, you’re probably going to get a good idea of my bad taste in movies by reading the rest of these examples) was another film that underwent the censorship dubbing and went so far as to replace words like bang with boom. The replacements in that film stretched from the over-cautious to the ridiculous. The term “they’re going to freak out” was even dubbed to “they’re going to flip out” for some unknown reason. Ghostbusters, RoboCop, The Godfather, The Big Lebowski and others have faced the same ridiculous dubbing to replace potentially offensive words. As stated before, I found these humorous and thought it ridiculous they didn’t just beep out the words, but censors have been digging further and further. Looking to music nowadays, it’s difficult to find a song, let alone an entire album, without an offensive language warning. That is, unless, you’re hearing the radio edit (referring to those songs that have had their content changed, not those that have been shortened for radio play). Likely the most famous edit in recent memory is Cee Lo Green’s Forget You, which went so far as to change the title from the ‘F’ word to Forget. While it seems like a completely normal thing to do, especially since the song was featured on the main-stream, prime-time television hit show Glee, I found that, once I had heard the original, the dubbed version just didn’t hold up to the same intensity. Telling someone that you’re going to forget them because they’ve wronged you seems a heck of a lot more tame than telling them something using more vulgar language. Again, I’m not saying that the ‘F’ word, or any other curse word, should be yelled loudly over the radio or prime-time television but, when you’re dealing with a medium which is purely auditory, changing the words can have a big effect on the message. With Green’s hit, it changes it from someone being very angry with a former sweetheart and their current significant other to someone who is moving on after a relationship went south. Some changes, like James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful, which had the ‘F’ word changed to flying, fits fine without really affecting the final message of the song. D12, a rap group featuring Eminem, however, had an entire song changed for radio play. Their popular tune Purple Hills was originally called Purple Pills and featured drug references, profanity and inappropriate lyrics. In some cases, a radio edit can be done properly and tastefully. In other cases, like with D12’s example, the song might not be fit for general public consumption. In still other cases, the edit changes the entire tone of the song and an alternative, like a simple beeping of the swear word, needs to be considered. However, I guess some of it is as a result of trying to avoid not having music on the radio at all. Most people know of songs that were removed from radio play after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. Songs like John Lennon’s Imagine were put on a no-play list not because of any particular lyric but because they portrayed a world vision that clashed with the vision being chased by those in power. (The danger behind Imagine in particular has never been fully explained to me and I doubt it ever will.) Some changes are just completely off the wall. In searching for songs that had unnecessary radio edits, I turned up a few like Nicki Minaj’s Starships. (Please do not take this as a suggestion to listen to Nicki Minaj, I do not endorse any of the musicians in the column). Minaj’s song has her saying her name, Onika, which some censors felt was too close to a racial slur. It was taken out of the song and replaced with silence. The Black Eyed Peas referenced satellite radio in their song Boom Boom Pow. Satellite radio is made popular by the fact that they don’t face the same strict restrictions that standard radio stations do. That said, standard radio stations weren’t going to play anything that gave a shout-out to their competitor so now the song just says “radio.” Lightning Crashes, a song by Live had the term placenta edited out likely because people didn’t want to explain it to their kids. You know, because kids have no idea what physical relationships are by the time they’re listening to music. And lastly, in Sir Mix-a-Lot’s timeless classic, Baby Got Back, censors edited out a line where he told women with healthy figures to dial 1-900-Mix-A-Lot. They replaced the 1- 900 part with a beep. I guess they were worried kids would dial the number and cost their parents a lot of money. Regardless, censorship is out of control. Art is being changed by what is allowed and what is not allowed to be said. Heck, even new songs like Icona Pop’s I Don’t Care are being fundamentally changed, in my opinion, by replacing what could be considered crass terms with more polite terms. I’m not going to get into details, but go listen to it online and compare it to the version I’m sure you’ve heard on the radio on your drive into work in the morning. I know I can’t not hear it if I’m in the car for more than 15 minutes. The original has more grab, more dare and more assertiveness to it. The edited version paints a different picture. Denny Scott Denny’s Den Censorship gone wild and wrong A truly nasty man Very quietly and in front of very few viewers, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford made his most hateful and shocking claim yet: suggesting a Toronto Star reporter may be a pedophile. On a Vision TV program hosted by disgraced media baron Conrad Black, Ford cited his May, 2012 run-in with Star reporter Daniel Dale as the highest level of media meddling he has experienced. “The worst one was Daniel Dale in my backyard taking pictures. I have little kids,” Ford told Black on the program, which aired twice last week. “When a guy’s taking pictures of little kids, I don’t want to say the word, but you start thinking, you know, what’s this guy all about?” As Ford said, he didn’t want to “say the word” but the implication is not up for debate; everyone knows what the disgraced mayor was driving at. In a response to Ford’s interview, Dale wrote a piece for the newspaper on Dec. 11 disagreeing with a number of Ford’s statements. Dale claims he took just one picture that night, of a park adjacent to Ford’s home, and it was deleted. He claimed to never be in Ford’s backyard, or peering over its fence. Police reports back Dale’s version of the events, which ended with Ford grabbing Dale and holding his fist just inches from Dale’s face while demanding his Blackberry (which he planned on using to take pictures). “I stand by every word I said with Mr. Black in my interview,” Ford would later say. In his piece for the Star, Dale says he has received legal advice after Ford’s “libelous” statements and has filed a lawsuit. While Ford has been far from considerate during his years in office, the majority of his stupidity has simply harmed himself and his family. He has been on the warpath against the Toronto Star for years, calling reporters “pathological liars” and “maggots” along the way, but reporters were eventually vindicated by police reports and Ford’s own confessions. This statement, however, is a horse of a different colour and everybody knows it. In this age of the internet, Dale is right when he says accusations of pedophilia, no matter how baseless, will stick to him forever. So when Ford, whose hands are about as far from clean as they can get, makes these claims against Dale, they threaten his career, his livelihood and his personal life forever more. But as long as Ford (in his mind) comes out of the interview looking a little bit better, that’s all he cares about. He doesn’t care how many bodies he leaves in his wake, he’s made that clear. He has dragged his wife into his mess, his family, his fellow councillors and the people of Toronto, all because he (admittedly) drinks too much and has dabbled in crack cocaine. Dale, by all accounts, has kept his nose clean, he’s been good at his job and he’s made something of himself. Ford, on the other hand, has found himself embroiled in scandal after scandal, all of which are of his own creation. Sure, he has been elected by the people of Toronto a number of times and, by some accounts, has had a successful political career, but he will be forever remembered as the hard- drinking, crack-smoking mayor of Toronto who makes racist and homophobic comments and has “more than enough to eat at home”. Hopefully everyone will see through Ford’s latest attempt to drag an upstanding citizen into the mud, where Ford, a proven liar time and again, has made his living.