'Ganda Bash

Big all-day propaganda conference coming up in midtown Madhattan: "Where the Truth Lies." Keynoter: Milton Glaser. He asks, per the press release, "Is there any difference between good propaganda and bad propaganda?" Put another way, "Where does truth end and 'spin' begin?"

Topics include: How American Presidents Persuade the Public to Go to War. "It is not war that Americans hate, but, rather, unsuccessful wars," says Eugene Secunda, a marketing and media prof at NYU, per the release. He explains why a majority of Americans "are more than willing to buy a war if it is properly packaged and skillfully marketed."

How about this one? Learning from Las Vegas. "Progressives continue to depend upon sober reason to guide them," says Stephen Duncombe, a political activist and NYU prof. He believes they need to adopt a "spectacular vernacular" without adopting Vegas values. (Paul Krassner, anyone?) And this: The Changing Face of Consumer Marketing. "Sam Travis Ewen -- the man behind the LED light boards that prompted officials to shut down Boston last year -- has some answers." (Abbie Hoffman, anyone?)

Here's a cutie: Your Consumer is Revolting. With a serious subtitle: The History of Rumor Control in American Marketing. "American corporations and government entities have long attempted to monitor, control and influence word-of-mouth communication in order to align it with their own interests." The marketing exec who "led all communication research for Procter & Gamble," per the press release, "will survey the development of rumor control, as the process is known, and the marketing industry's recent response to mass adoption of the Internet."

There's plenty more: Why You Can Trust Comment and Opinion More Than News, also Corporations in the Classroom, and an advance screening of clips from a 10-hour PBS documentary, "Carrier," about life on the USS Nimitz during a six-month deployment to the Persian Gulf.

The conference, moderated by David Brancaccio, is being presented by the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in collaboration with the PhD Programs in History and Sociology of the Graduate Center, CUNY. It begins Friday (Feb. 15) at 9 a.m. and runs through 4 p.m. Place: 365 Fifth Ave. (btwn 34th & 35th Streets), in the Baisley Powell Elebash Recital Hall, GC CUNY. $35 (general admission); $20 (students). Tel: 212.592.2200.

February 13, 2008 9:50 AM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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