Well, 2021 has come and gone. Headline: Rocco Anson Weinberg was born on November 9 to Diane and Jesse.
Here he is at six weeks, having grown by more than 33% since birth:
We all can tell that he’s going to be a fascinating character as he grows.
So, 2021… I have spent the entire year birthing and organizing a new video platform (like a hybrid Internet TV channel) imageunion.tv, with Jesse and Eleanor. My Media Burn book wound up on hold. There are now several dozen on the team involved with us: video curators, online experts and video creators around the world. They all joined us as believers in the near-impossible task we are closing in on every day.
After the launch on 2/2/22, Groundhog Day, you will find us online at imageunion.tv 24/7 and on several streaming channels including Roku, twitch, Twitter, Facebook Live, and YouTubeLive.
This has been an ambitious (and daunting) challenge…to be little guys with slingshot programming in a billion-dollar corporate goliath media world. We know our unique curated videos combined with live events will succeed in attracting an audience. What we don’t know is how to get enough Image Union members quickly so we can generate the funds needed to operate successfully and make money back for our investors. The process is fun in any case and bringing in many thousands of people worldwide to be part of a community will be a unifying experience for all. By the 2023 new year’s edition, the tale will have been told: good, bad or ugly.
While on Good Bad + Ugly, it was one of my favorite movies of all time, (1966 Spaghetti Western)…here’s the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFNUGzCOQoI. It’s a grand way to enjoy wasting 2+ hours of your busy winter.
Just last week, I came across this photo, probably from 1966 of the three stars Clint Eastwood, now 91, Eli Wallach, who died at 98 in 2014, and Lee Van Cleef (1925-1989):
A Look Back
This is the first issue of the eighth year of my custodianship of the Weinberg House Organ/PY-O-MY Letter. My dad wrote it from 1952 until his death in 1967. As with much of what happens in life (mine for sure) it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had no idea of the long-term effects: beneficial for me and for some of you each month; also, a bit of a monkey on my back to get done on my self-imposed deadline; and a wonderful outlet that challenges me to think and spew it out, almost always with reactions from you readers that make me feel good.
A little perspective is always valuable, so I went back and looked at the first item or two of each of the last seven January 1 PY-O-MY Letters. I thought you’d enjoy the trip also. Here they are, exactly as they appeared:
January 1, 2014
Dear Friend:
INTRO: This is a revival
After sending out a couple beta tests, I realized that I’m not “A Blog Writer,” in the 2014 sense of the term.
What I’m doing now is much more akin to what my father, Louis Weinberg, Jr., wrote for the last 13 or so years of his life. He was originally an adman—a copy writer starting in the 1930’s, two decades before Mad Men. From 1947 until he died in 1967, he was the president of a baking mix company, PY-O-MY.
The letter he sent out was usually 4-5 pages, every four to six weeks. He called it The Weinberg House Organ. It was duplicated on the Ditto mimeograph machine, hand stapled and sent via U.S. mail (for less than a dime). Frequently, he would show it to me before it was sent out.
Many of the eventual 1000-plus “subscribers” called it “The PY-OMY Letter” because of the logo on top. Most issues would include comments from readers.
So, I see this as a digital version, carrying on from where he left off 46½ years ago…the new, and perhaps not improved, Weinberg House Organ/PY-O-MY letter. It will reflect my points of view, possibly controversial to many of you. I’ll say what I feel and think as of the moment. Some of it might be self-promoting, or at least keeping you current on my meanderings and michigas. Like the original, it will include clips, with the added advantage of links to writing and images that you might have missed.
Plus, maybe an occasional puzzle, ongoing dialog on some of the items, and a sprinkle of funny/ironic stuff. As I said when I was interviewed a bunch of years ago on Entertainment Tonight about THE 90’s TV series:
“If it’s not entertaining, we’ve failed.”
I’ll try not to fail.
***
ALL GOVERNMENT IS LOCAL: Was Tip O’Neill Right?
We can’t ignore globalism and the way the world economic and financial systems are intertwined.
Here’s a local example: The City of Chicago sold off the ownership rights to all of its parking meters in a fire-sale deal a couple years ago. And because the Mayor Richie Daley needed upfront money so badly (to pay deficits rather than raising taxes or spending less), the purchaser, a Wall Street consortium, paid a rock-bottom price…about 50% of what the rights were estimated to be worth, and in perpetuity.
Wall Street did what it does best, of course. It chopped up the parking meter deal and sold it in pieces. One large portion is owned by a wealth fund in the Middle East.
How does that grab you?
If you’ve paid to park in the city of Chicago over the past few years, the money no longer goes to the federal or local government. It’s not for our schools, roads, or pensions. It goes to Wall Street bankers and to oil-rich Middle Eastern rulers.
The rates recently went up again. I might add that the meters are one of the most user-unfriendly parts of living and driving in Chicago…inconvenient, old technology, time consuming and unnecessarily exposing parkers to the rain and snow.
Does Qatar care?
January 1, 2015
HAPPY NEW YEAR, 2015
What a number! Hard to fathom. It figures to be momentous in many ways, starting in our family with Maggie Jane Kliner who’ll probably be talking and starting to walk by next new year’s day.
It’s also the year of Cuba. How events unfold and what the effects will be of the “westernizing” and “democracy-building” will be fascinating to watch. The Cubanos are wonderful joyful people, at least 80% of whom have lived without any sense of the world beyond their island. I’ve been there twice, teaching “Documental” at International School of Cinema and Television (EICTV) with dear friend Russell Porter, global documentarian, teacher, author, maven. http://www.eictv.org/quienes-somos/nuevas-miradas/
People have no guns in Cuba. There’s almost zero street violence or fear of crime. Narcos and gangs, so prevalent now in almost every Caribbean and Central American country don’t exist. There’s almost no raucous public drunkenness. They have no billboards or TV commercials or advertising for anything except the Revolution. The life expectancy, infant mortality rate, and levels of education far exceed those of the U.S.A.
But, they pay a price for all that: fear of political and personal reprisal for doing anything that might be interpreted as counter to the Revolution, which can be broadly defined; practically no consumer goods–nearly all shelves are bare in many downtown Havana stores; they’ve been forced to make-do with what they have, including constantly inventing ways to keep their 1958 Studebakers and other amazing cars running; they’ve just recently been able to get on the internet (with restrictions on access to sites freely available here), and, as of now, nobody can afford computers; an extraordinarily high percentage of jobs are beholden to myriad bureaucracies of the government, which are definitely subject to corruption. (That could never happen in Washington or Chicago!).
Music and dancing are everywhere, despite the dire economic conditions. The colonial buildings and beaches are magnificent. People are absolutely friendly to touristas. Beisbol is a religion. It’s still mostly rural or small towns…less than 20% of population is in Havana.
What will happen when the country emerges from the 1950’s and after the Castros is anybody’s guess. One thing’s for sure: it will change drastically, probably in 2015, but certainly in years that follow.
***
ONWARD…to the JUNGLE
This is also the year of our remarkable planned adventure, discovery, and documentation of a Lost City in the Miskitia jungle in Honduras. It’s remnants from a culture that existed centuries ago, but has never been documented before. I have been on this case with Steve Elkins since 1994.
What an amazing opportunity to explore and document the unknown…very cool for three old and experienced filmmakers, Bill Benenson and Steve (“Dr. Helkins”) and me.
There are literally 1000’s of moving parts to this operation. It’s a miracle that they’re all coming together, primarily coordinated by Steve, but with a cast of some 12 PhDs and support of dozens of people, from Tegucigalpa to Pasadena.
We’re hoping to go early in 2015. And we’ll produce documentation of genuine discovery after we land in the middle of uncharted and super-dense jungle via helicopter. It’s hard to believe any places like that still exist on spaceship earth. For sure, I’ve never done anything quite like this, despite producing hundreds of non-fiction videos for the last 45 years. Stay tuned.
January 1, 2016
“AMATEUR NIGHT”
That’s what we young drinkers used to call New Year’s Eve. It triggers how my attitudes about alcohol have changed. Drinking is an integral component of every victory celebration, in the locker room and on the streets. Every parade, football game or holiday is an alcohol-saturated event. College binge drinking is at an all-time high. The industry grows and grows, in no small part by advertising by the hundreds of millions on TV.
A Washington Post article December 22 by Christopher Ingram reported:
Alcohol is killing Americans at a rate not seen in at least 35 years, according to new federal data. Last year, more than 30,700 Americans died from alcohol-induced causes, including alcohol poisoning and cirrhosis, which is primarily caused by alcohol use. In 2014, there were 9.6 deaths from these alcohol-induced causes per 100,000 npeople, an increase of 37 percent since 2002…. This tally of alcohol-induced fatalities excludes deaths from drunk driving, other accidents, and homicides committed under the influence of alcohol. If those numbers were included the annual toll of US deaths directly or indirectly caused by alcohol would be closer to 90,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In recent years, public health experts have focused extensively on overdose deaths from heroin and prescription painkillers, which have risen rapidly since the early 2000s. But in 2014, more people died from alcohol-induced causes (30,722) than from overdoses of prescription painkillers and heroin combined (28,647), according to the CDC.
Ingram goes on to report that 30 per cent of American adults don’t drink at all. Another 30% consume, on average, less than one drink per week. But, it’s a bit shocking to see that the top 10% of American adults – 24 million of them – consume 74 drinks a week, more than ten drinks a day.
We got a problem. I see it almost every day, as I’m sure you do too. New year’s resolutions don’t begin to solve the huge, but under-publicized problems. I’m interested in your views and if they’ve changed over the years too.
January 1, 2017
Dear Friend:
I have mostly kept myself distracted from the realities and fears about what’s coming and going on with the guy who has started to be called Trumpelthinskin.
The head of our country…
****
I’ve been concentrating on finishing my book about my personal experiences discovering the lost city in the jungle in Honduras and my take on more than 22 years of chasing. With my long-time friend and brilliant designer, Elan Soltes, we are creating a unique book with my text and dozens of our group’s pictures. It’s a companion to what I think will be a best-seller by world class author Douglas Preston. The Lost City of the Monkey God debuts this week, on January 3.
the PY-O-MY Letter for details about where and how it will be available. It’s built around the chronicles—28 diaries I wrote nightly when we were in Honduras in 2012 and in 2015. See the website for the book at chasingthelostcity.com
January 1, 2018
Ah, 2018, Once in A Blue Moon
Everything Takes Longer Than You Think, or…
Tegucigalpa Wasn’t Built in a Day
It took our friends at Kartemquin Films only about 8 years, start to finish, to make the classic documentary HOOP DREAMS. James Joyce began work steadily on Finnegans Wake in 1922 and it was published in 1939—17 years of writing in Paris.
Our Lost City discovery in Honduras, an adventure, two books, and eventually Bill Benenson’s documentary, has taken 22 years for me, and an extra year for our leader, Steve Elkins (aka “Dr. Helkins,” in the Latin American media).
My notes date back to 1995. My first trip into the jungle area was in 1998 aboard a U.S. Military helicopter. We dipped into the valley where we thought the “city” was likely to be located (from the satellite images and scientific speculation) and took some stills and video from above. (It turned out 17 years later that it WAS there.)
The major breakthrough was accomplished in spring, 2012: the absolute identification of structures and remnants of human habitation by use of LiDAR, airborne laser mapping, of three target areas in the jungle. As far as we know, nobody had ever taken the risk and expense to explore an unknown archaeological site with remote airborne imaging.
After centuries of vague rumors and legends, in the early 1990’s Steve and I with a couple explorer pals, Captain Steve Morgan and Bruce Heinecke, developed a major project which eventually included 13 PhD’s. Everyone was younger than Benenson, Elkins and Weinberg (known as “A.K. Productions.”) Dr. Chris Fisher, the lead archaeologist, was savvy in remote-sensing and ground-proofing with at least a decade of experience. Dr. Juan Carlos Fernandez Diaz, Honduran-born Houston-based LiDAR specialist (and pilot), has done hundreds of airborne mapping projects worldwide.
Every member of our team of 20+ experts was fascinated and spurred on by the unknown that lurks in what Fisher and others had speculated was a pre-Mayan settlement, abandoned for at least 500 years. Some have called it preternatural—outside the ordinary set of assumptions.
Cultural anthropologist and former Smithsonian Latin American curator Dr. Alicia M. González has speculated that this settlement (commonly known as “Ciudad Blanca” or “Lost City of the Monkey Gods”) could have been a stopping point along the ancient trade pathway that stretched from South America to North America.
As 2018 begins, it’s still an ongoing scholarly project, a continuing effort to uncover and analyze whatever is there. Honduran and North American archaeologists and other scientists continue the work we began. More than 200 relics from the “city” have now been found and catalogued, but the mystery continues.
January 1, 2019
best wish for the new year:
January 1, 2020
My wishes for the New Year
Healthy 2020 to everyone I love and have loved:
-my biological kids, their two kids
-my four stepchildren and their ten kids (in Alaska, Montana and Highland Park)
-Eleanor and her three (in Brooklyn and Kentucky)
-And finally, I hope it’s a terrible year for Mitch McConnell.
For me in 2020 I hope:
– to play tennis at least 52 times
-Media Burn has its most productive year ever
-the movie of our jungle exploration will be available on Netflix or somewhere you can watch it
-my book will be published so anyone can see it
-the White Sox will be fun to watch and become a contender.
January 1, 2021
What’s Right With This Picture?
The 49 vice-presidents of the USA. When all is said and done, January 20, 2021 will be a historic milestone.
And it won’t be about Joe Biden.
****
Video Credibility
I’m not the only person who has thought about, written about or taught college about this concept. But I have been thinking forever about the impact of screens on credibility. It’s one way to understand the Trump era. The idea is that:
If a person is on TV regularly and enough, s/he has the unique ability to be trusted by masses of people.
It almost doesn’t matter what kind of relationship the “star” establishes with the viewer as long as it’s perceived as real.
This phenomenon has been with us from the beginning of television (~1947.)
The first example I can remember is Arthur Godfrey. He was on every morning on CBS, radio and television. He was hard to avoid…the most popular media personality in America. If he said something was good, America bought it, in droves. Like Lipton Tea (“Deeee-licious”) or Chesterfields (“Buy ’em by the carton”)
Oprah was the next incarnation of that power. Only her impact wasn’t usually about particular brands, but books, doctors, spiritual leaders, etc. Nobody ever has been as personally influential on TV as Oprah. In the language of the advertising industry, she had the most reach and frequency.
In the past few years, Trump, the televangelists, the Pillow Guy, the Geico gecko have all been masters of the medium…to get people to buy stuff, doing what TV does best: delivering eyeballs (audiences) to big corporate advertisers.
William S. Paley, the first electronic media billionaire, was founder and chairman of CBS from 1928 to his death in 1990. Despite his high-falutin lifestyle and philanthropic contributions, he had no illusions about the purpose of television:
“Television isn’t a news medium; it’s a SALES MEDIUM.”
FOX News, by far, the most-watched news channel, and its relationship with Trump is video credibility taken to its next logical plateau. While nearly everybody I know (and I expect it’s true for you also) thinks Trump’s four year presidency was a shameful performance, there are millions who saw him “governing” and said “He’s our President and we know him, for better and worse.”
Of course, the only way they KNOW him is from television and online. Trust him? Not necessarily. Believe what he says? Sometimes, but apparently it didn’t matter — they voted for him anyhow…more than 74 million of them in 2020. It made no difference that all of us and almost everyone we know “knew better.”
Marshall McLuhan, whose genius (unfortunately) has been distilled to one phrase (“The medium IS the message,”) knew it all. But he died in 1980, before the internet which he predicted but never saw. If he had been around in 2020, he would have understood Trump’s double credibility whammy of TV and Twitter (an average 18 times a day, more than 25,000 tweets in his four years behind the curtain in White House Mar-a-Lago and Air Force One).
I’ve been thinking there’s a book somewhere in me that spells out Video Credibility on screens and Media Burn…maybe in 2021?
CONCLUSION, JANUARY 1, 2022
As someone who has spent thousands of hours involved with “old” video, I realize that looking back at the raw material of an earlier time has a unique effect on how to interpret the present. Maybe seven years of the first items of House Organs isn’t enough of a sample, but I hope it helps see where we have gotten to with a clearer eye.
Please keep your eyes, mouths and minds as clear as possible in this impossible isolated masked-up pandemic.
Seeya February 1.
As ever,
PY-O-MY 
RIGHT YOU ARE!: billion-dollar corporate goliath media world…..
Thanks, Thomas, for the interesting look back and the promises we now expect for 2022 and beyond. AND, heartiest congrats on the arrival of boy-child Rocco Anson—a beautiful looking young man!
WARMLY, with respects, —Bj
>
Tom, Mayreeee here. That’s what you used to call me. I enjoyed the first day posts of years past. Always good to look at what was in our thoughts. I especially like it when you talk about Uncle Louis. I love learning more about him and seeing him as a person, his likes, his work, his thoughts, his unique personality and cleverness. Not just as my wonderful uncle. THANKS and happy-–gotta be better —new year.
I am so excited for your new adventure! I will definitely check it out! Best of luck with it! And yes, we will, keep going. We must! HUGS.