It's shaping up to be a big year for Helvetica. The world's most widely used sans-serif font turns 50 in 2007, and to celebrate, the Museum of Modern Art has launched a year-long tribute to the ubiquitous typeface, which was the first acquired by the Museum for its permanent collection.

Meanwhile, back in March at the SXSW FIlm Festival, I managed to squeeze into a packed screening of a documentary titled simply Helvetica. The directorial debut of Gary Hustwit (he previously produced the Wilco film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart), the film is essentially an academic treatise on the cultural proliferation of the world's most pervasive font. The idea of watching 8-10 international design masters debate the socioeconomic symbolism of a typeface might sound like torture. It's not, thanks in part to Helvetica's uber-cool post-rock soundtrack (featuring contributions from The Album Leaf, Sam Prekop, and current Pitchfork darlings Battles). As a design layperson, I had a little trouble telling the various European typography rock stars apart, but for graphic design geeks (like my boyfriend, who sat next to me at the screening in rapt attention), Helvetica plays like extremely tasteful porn.

This past weekend, Slate.com devoted two full features to Helvetica-mania. While Mia Fineman's essay/slideshow comes off as a cheap ploy to rack up page views whilst promoting Hustwit's film, in the other feature famous writers revealed the font in which they most like to write. Their answers ranged from anecdotal (Palatino makes Caleb Crain think of Marlboros, which in turn makes him want to smoke) to semi-delusional (typing in Courier allows Jonathan Lethem to fantasize that he's banging away not at a PC, but at "an eternal Selectric of the mind"). Courier received four additional votes. Helvetica got zero love--in fact, Anne Fadiman even prefaced her endorsement of Times Roman by announcing that her "favorite fonts are unrepentantly anti-Helvetican."

All of this hoopla seems to center on a single question: why Helvetica--or why not? What makes this font different from all other fonts, and why does it arouse so much passion in both lovers and haters? In Hustwit's film, the same qualities named as virtues by Helvetica's supporters--its simplicity, utilitarianism and modernism--are cited as fatal flaws by the font's detractors. In the world defined by the documentary, how you feel about Helvetica determines what kind of person you are. Helvetica is a European invention that has attained a sheen of Americana through its omnipresence in our popular culture--like french fries, or even cinema. As with those staples of modern life, when it comes to Helvetica one man's elegance is another man's banality.

There's an interesting story in today's Washington Post (submitted to Netscape by TechnologyExpert), in which various pundits and GOP operatives wring their hands over the Republican Party's alleged inability to compete with Democratic candidates on the internet. An excerpt:



As that excerpt makes clear, the Post's Jose Antonio Vargas chose to focus on the early front runners in both parties, and in doing so, he makes a fatal error by exclusion. The story fails to mention Ron Paul, whose official YouTube channel has a good 2,000 more subscribers than Barack Obama's channel and almost three times as many subscribers as John Edwards'. The Republican underdog is also clearly on the mind of bloggers; his name has been the number one search term on Technorati for several weeks.

I called Ron Paul's Austin-based campaign headquarters to get their take on the Washington Post story. Jesse Benton, Paul's communications director, told me that the Paul campaign was not contacted by the Post in connection with the story. "It is a little ironic that the strongest Republican candidate on the Internet was excluded from a story about Republicans on the Internet. I think that has been a little typical of our treatment in the mainstream media. I also think that is changing--the mainstream media is paying a little more attention to us every day."

All the more ironic is the fact that the Paul campaign has specifically sought to use the Web as a tool to reach voters in absence of that coveted MSM attention. "The internet is a major part of our strategy," Benton says. "We think it's a powerful force in leveling the playing field and allowing non-Establishment candidates, without nationwide name-recognition at this early point in the campaign, to be able to stand up on the same platform with self-anointed--or mainstream media-anointed--front runners." Benton attributes Paul's online success in no small part to his message. "He is the leading advocate for Internet freedom in Congress: he has never voted to tax the Internet or regulate it in any way. People who have a presence on the Internet realize that he is their strongest champion."

So why exclude the Paul camp from the story? I've contacted Vargas and will update this blog post when I get a response.

Earlier this week on Newsquake, we told you about the Pentagon's decision to block soldiers from accessing YouTube over DoD networks. Yesterday, YouTube's creators and chief executives issued an insouciant response. Via Detroit Free Press:


You've gotta wonder: are Hurley and friends standing up to the Pentagon in the name of First Amendment rights? Or are they just terrified at the prospect of losing all those page views?

Our top story on Netscape last night and this morning was this op-ed from left-wing blog SmokingPolitics, predicting a nasty political fight for Al Gore once his new book, The Assault on Reason, is released next week. Bloggers Dave Johnson and James Boyce say this event will give the Left the perfect opportunity to draw attention to "the mechanism of the smear":


With an excerpt from The Assault live on TIME.com (and at the top of buzz-generated news aggregator Memeorandum) as of this morning, let's take a look at the first responses to Gore's tome. Because bloggers like to talk about themselves debate the nebulous laws governing the Web, let's focus specifically on Gore's statements about network neutrality.

Tensions are really heating up this week in the world of online image sharing. First, on Monday, Heather Champ and Derek Powazek, co-creators of the socially-produced photography magazine JPG (you've probably flipped through it at Urban Outfitters whilst waiting for your significant other to try on pants), announced that they were leaving their baby in the hands of their former business partners. The split was acrimonious, to say the least. The magazine and its parent company, 8020 Publishing, will now be run by CEO Paul Coutier, in partnership with CNET founder Halsey Minor. As Champ put it in a blog post, the new ownership


In post on his own blog, Powazek (who is Champ's husband as well as collaborator) painted Cloutier as an underhanded power-grabber. Cloutier's goal, he argues, is to recast JPG as less of a built-from-nothing community-powered experiment, and more of a traditional publishing venture.

It's Upfronts Week, which means that the five major broadcast TV networks will be holding press conferences to announce their Fall 2007 schedules. NBC and ABC went first, with CBS, The CW and FOX scheduled to present tomorrow and Wednesday. For the latest upfronts news, here's a list of resources to keep an eye on. If you see something you like, make it sure to share it with the rest of the Netscape community by submitting it to our Television channel.

***Our friends at TV Squad have a whole section devoted to the upfronts, with bloggers like Joel Keller and Bob Sassone posting detailed analysis of each network's strategy.

***Virginia Heffernan, NY Times TV critic and author of the excellent web video blog Screens, is live blogging the upfronts here. Her (ironic?) excitement about NBC's new straight-to-online soap Coastal Dreams is infectious.

***The LA Times' television critics are blogging the upfronts, too. Wondering how the Grey's Anatomy spinoff made it onto ABC's fall schedule, despite the fact that virtually all fans and critics thought it was awful? Scroll down to the second-to-last paragraph of this entry.

***TVWeek's James Hibbard's live blog gives Defamer one last chance to kick Aaron Sorkin while he's down. Also: George Lopez loses his timeslot to the Geico cavemen.

***New York Magazine's Daily Intel blog says Lindsay Lohan (who is not, as far as we know, involved in any network's fall line-up) swooped in on upfront swag.

The U.S. Military is embracing YouTube--and simultaneously banning soldiers from accessing the video sharing site while overseas. Netscape Navigator _kam0_ submitted this BBC story yesterday, which describes the military's new official channel on YouTube. About two months old, the Multi-National Iraq-Force channel gives the military an opportunity to highlight positive progress in Iraq. According to the BBC's Laura Smith-Spark:

Today's top story in the Movies channel concerns a lawsuit filed by the grandparents of a 12-year-old girl, which asserts that she was traumatized when a substitute teacher showed Brokeback Mountain in her elementary school classroom. The Oscar winner is rated R for nudity (mostly female) and sex (both heterosexual and male-on-male). The lawsuit alleges that before playing the film, the teacher shut the classroom door and said, "What happens in Ms. Buford's class stays in Ms. Buford's class"--a comment that suggests at least a little ambivalence about the appropriateness of the film for preteens. The family is accusing the school of "negligence, false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress."

Predictably, bloggers are lining up on both sides of the issue, although just about everyone seems to agree that R-rated movies--including the flick that launched a million gay cowboy jokes--shouldn't be shown in elementary school. Here's a sampling of the chatter:

"Once again, as a teacher I am mortified at the poor judgment and sheer stupidity of some of my fellow educators." -- Verum Serum

"Parents see chance to sue and get big bucks so they can have nicer things. Civilization as humans know it to collapse sometime around noon today, or at least by supper time." -- Editorials From Hell's Leading Newspaper

"Now, I loved the movie. But Heath mounting Jake just isn't peanut butter-and-jelly fare. Call me a neoconservative, I just don't agree with it." -- Ravnostic

"This story is a unfortunate byproduct of liberal activism. It is not one of tolerance and diversity because it is intolerant and disrespectful toward those of faith not to mention those who struggle with raising children in the world of the entertainment industry's pro sex, drugs and guns mentality." -- Webloggin

"You know, as I recall, William Faulkner had that effect on me. I wonder what the statute of limitations is on psychological-assault-by-bad-literature." -- Overlawyered

Of all the films for a substitute teacher to show to a class, why Brokeback Mountain? I personally don't think the film glamorizes the homosexual lifestyle--if anything, it shows the potential agony that awaits anyone who pursues it. But why show a film like that to a class if you're not trying to provoke a debate? Is there a grand liberal agenda at work here, or did this Ms. Buford just happen to have the DVD in her purse? Is the lawsuit justified, or is the moral debate just an excuse for the family to cash in? What's your take?

That's the query posed by this story from Politico.com, submitted this morning by Netscape Scout Tim A. Loftis. The most damaging quote in the story comes from none other than the most visible female in the political blogosphere, Arianna Huffington. "Hillary Clinton's problem with the blogosphere is that she has been so calculating that you can smell it," Huffington told Politico's Sam Stein. "Every thought has been processed through multiple channels in her and her consultants' brains. It's so fabricated."

One thing that could be hurting Hillary is her sheer visibility. Good bloggers thrive on making discoveries just off the mainstream radar, and no current candidate has been on the radar for longer than Hillary Clinton. Case in point: the number one search term on Technorati for the past couple of days has been Ron Paul:


The Republican candidate (who ran for President under the Libertarian banner in 1998) likely impressed bloggers at last week's debate with his traditional fiscal conservatism and opposition to the Iraq War. Over the past week, Paul's official YouTube page has outpaced those of his Republican rivals, with 2,199 subscribers to Mitt Romney's 1,899.

The Politico piece is specifically concerned with the upswing of anti-Hillary sentiment. But perhaps a bigger issue is the fact that, according to Technorati, the overall number of mentions of the female candidate by bloggers is on the downswing:


So for today, Paul is up and Clinton is down. But it's best to remember that bloggers are fickle. It's early enough in the race that we'll almost certainly see a Ron Paul backlash, and a backlash to the Hillary backlash, before the first primary.

One of our top stories on Netscape today is a Newshound takedown of Fox News stalwart Bill O'Reilly, who has blamed MSNBC's "far left" slant for the poor ratings of last week's Republican debate. Since the Newshound site exists for the sole purpose of slamming Fox News, its take on the story doesn't exactly come as a shock. "You need to face some facts," Newshound tells O'Reilly. "You've peaked and Keith Olbermann is coming up behind you and MSNBC considers him a great asset."

But do they? According to an AP story circulated by Jossip and The Huffington Post, MSNBC did have to contend with flack from conservatives regarding Olbermann's debate night commentary, particularly concerning Rudy Giuliani, whose team actually called MSNBC to complain. AP's David Bauder suggested that "having Olbermann anchor [a political news event] is the MSNBC equivalent of Fox News Channel assigning the same duties to O'Reilly." In other words, news guys should take care of reporting news, and commentary guys who get paid to ruffle feathers should only be brought in after the fact.

The South By Southwest Film Festival is widely considered to be one of the top showcases for documentary film in North America, and if we're to take the 2007 lineup as an indicator of general trends, then there is currently no hotter nonfiction genre than the election movie. The Festival (which began last Friday and runs concurrently with the famed SXSW Music Conference through March 18) is screening at least five feature films focused on elections. An inordinate amount of attention has already been bestowed on just one of SXSW 2007's election films, the Michael Moore expose Manufacturing Dissent. But while that production by Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine offers an undeniably alluring behind-the-scenes peek at the documentary world's biggest blowhard, another SXSW election doc has managed to embroil pop culture notables as disparate as Alec Baldwin and Jello Biafra in a massive smear against the most powerful man in California.

That film is Running With Arnold, directed by former entertainment reporter Dan Cox. The doc tracks Arnold Schwarzenegger's wild ride from Austrian yokel to world-class bodybuilder--and then from action superstar to titan of Sacramento. The film is comprised of old interviews with Arnold, new interviews with Arnold's detractors, clips from Arnold's movies, and footage shot during the whirlwind recall election that first put him in office. It's an extremely entertaining piece of propaganda, one which seems content to settle for knowing laughs from the choir in lieu of offering the kind of hard analysis that might actually convert skeptics.

Cox identifies Schwarzenegger's Achilles heel early on, with a clip from an ancient archival interview in which the young bodybuilder describes his unquenchable thirst for attention. As Cox tells it, a defining moment came while Schwarzenegger was serving in the Austrian military. He went AWOL in order to enter a bodybuilding competition, and when he returned to his unit, he was promptly thrown in jail. Not for the first time, the future Governator chose physical vanity and personal stardom over national duty. No doubt this is a dubious personality trait, and an embarrassing anecdote. But like most of the revelations in Running With Arnold, it's hardly the kind of thing that will make a dent in Schwarzenegger's career.

Remember last month, when Netscape handed out our own awards for the Golden Globes telecast? The plan was to do the same for the Academy Awards. But last night's production was a strange one, too odd in many ways to be reduced to bullet points, and one largely unworthy of praise. According to Matt Drudge, the general public wasn't even watching--if overnight estimates prove accurate, it will be the third least-watched Oscars in history. Nikki Finke warned us last week that telecast producer Laura Ziskin had a four-hour monster on her hands, but no one wants to believe that kind of bad news in advance. And based on the reports that have so far hit the Web, even those who get paid to watch these things could barely sit through this year's installment. The few bright spots have so far been glossed over by critics who seem appalled in equal measure by the show's lack of spectacle and host Ellen DeGeneres' velvet pantsuit.

These early reports (particularly Brian Lowry's review in Variety and Alessandra Stanley's analysis in the New York Times) sound simultaneously naive and hackneyed. At the Oscar viewing party I attended, at the IFC Center in downtown Manhattan, nobody in the local, primarily film industry-tangential crowd seemed particularly surprised that the show itself was overlong and, for long stretches, dreadfully dull. Certainly no one suggested that what the evening really needed was more production numbers and fewer flamboyant outfits. The New York crowd simply slogged through, clapping some but mocking more, waiting for the good stuff. For our perseverance, we were rewarded with four big wins (Film Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Picture) for the hometown favorite, Martin Scorsese's The Departed. The genuine sense of joy in the room when the final award of the night was announced made sitting through the show's interminable middle three hours seem almost worthwhile.

When the final episode of the Fox drama The O.C. airs tonight, it'll mark the end of an era. There will be distraught fans, such as 19-year-old Coleeeee, who informs the world via one the show's many MySpace groups that her "life is over when The O.C. is." Cast and crew will have to find new jobs, and moving on may be tough for some -- as star Benjamin McKenzie put it in a statement released by the show's publicist, "I'll probably miss working with everyone." But the loss will also be felt by indie rock bands and fans, by fashion designers and young style mavens, and by comic book producers and consumers. For though The O.C. 's ratings were at best average (and sometimes totally abysmal), the show served as a remarkably effective clearinghouse for totems of teenage cool.

The show was created in 2003 by television novice Josh Schwartz who, at age 27, was the youngest person to develop and produce his own one-hour drama in the history of network television. In a 2004 interview with the New York Times, Schwartz admitted to using a "Trojan Horse strategy" to get his foot in the door. Knowing that FOX was looking for a prime-time soap to replicate the success of Aaron Spelling's just-retired dinosaur Beverly Hills 90210, Schwartz crafted a pilot script that self-consciously hit all the high notes of the Spelling drama genre: pool parties, massive mansions, diva rivalries, cocaine. Then, as he later put it, Schwartz inserted "characters that were a little bit funnier and more soulful and different and specific than the kinds you usually see in that genre."

Much of the story of life in the luxurious (and fictional) Southern California suburb of Newport was seen through the eyes of Seth Cohen (played by Adam Brody), a friendless ninth grader obsessed with comic books and emo bands. In the series pilot, Seth's public defender father brings home Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie), a juvenile offender from less-than-desirable Chino, who has returned from a night in jail to find that his mom has skipped town without leaving so much as a note.

Soon this miscreant was installed in the Cohen family pool house. Ryan and Seth quickly formed a bond as outsiders, simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the glamour and excess of the Newport lifestyle. And the show's creator got to have it both ways. Schwartz gave Fox their shiny, highly-marketable soap sensation, all the while building a one-hour prime time drama about a friendship formed by two teenage boys, each of whom, though undeniably telegenic, fell somewhere outside the mold.

Rory Kennedy opens her latest documentary, The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, with footage of the Milgram Experiment, a 1961 behavioral study designed to ask the question, "Could the entire Holocaust really have been the work soldiers following orders?" The results demonstrated that most people will step way beyond their personal moral boundaries if directed to do so by an authority figure. In the Milgram case, subjects thought they were inflicting near-fatal electroshock treatments on unseen prisoners (in reality, they were causing no harm). Conversely, Kennedy demonstrates that the American soldiers involved in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture incidents were made to think that they were doing nothing wrong. When images of the extreme interrogation techniques leaked and the government needed a scapegoat, many of those same soldiers were then sent to prison for following orders.

Netscape sat down with Kennedy last month at the Sundance Film Festival. It was the morning after President Bush's State of the Union speech, and the director, a member of America's most famous left-leaning political family, discussed not only her film but the War on Terror, military history, governmental transparency, and why she thinks the majority of Americans "are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore." Ghosts of Abu Ghraib premieres Thursday, February 22 on HBO.


The film uses the Milgram Experiment as a structuring metaphor. Did you begin the project with that in mind?

I had originally planned to do a very different film, which was more about the nature of ordinary people who commit extraordinary acts of evil. We were looking to genocides to exemplify that. And then, like so many other people, I was horrified by the photographs that came out of Abu Ghraib, and continued to be haunted by them years after. I found myself asking: Who were these people and what motivated them? Were they the kids next door or were they psychopaths? What was their childhood like? And so I then went back to HBO, where I had been developing the film on genocide, and I said, "How would you feel if we were to change direction and look at Abu Ghraib as our example?'" They were excited about that, and I was then able to get access to a number of the soldiers involved in the abuse--and ultimately to the detainees.

When I talked to these people and asked the question, "Why did you do this?'", they all said the same thing: "I did it because I was told to do it." So Ghosts of Abu Ghraib became much more of an investigative film, and less of a psychological film.

Early on in Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, Donald Rumsfeld announces that the U.S. Army is about to engage in "the first war of the 21st century." There's an unmistakable note of pride in this statement, which dates from the eve of the Iraqi invasion in 2003. And that archival clip is a fitting place for Ferguson to begin his argument, which takes the former Defense Secretary to task for his arrogance, stubbornness, and general refusal to admit mistakes.

Ferguson built the film, his first (the Brookings Institute fellow received guidance from co-producer Alex Gibney of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room fame) out of 200+ hours of interviews with diplomats, scholars, former Bush administration officials and U.S. soldiers. The filmmaking team also ventured into war-torn central Baghdad, at great personal risk--this is the first film I've seen in which members of a security detail are given on-screen credits in advance of the editor and cinematographer. Ferguson's goal: to meticulously examine the first year of the conflict, pinpointing the key mistakes that continue to hamper the war effort today. The resulting film, though clinical in its treatment of the facts, paints a damning portrait of the Bush Administration's insistence on staying the course. Netscape News sat down with Ferguson and Gibney at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where No End in Sight premiered to standing ovations and was ultimately awarded a Special Prize by the Festival's Documentary Jury.

Netscape: I personally have a knee-jerk reaction against charges that key members of the Bush Administration are "stupid" or "evil." What's a more reasonable way of explaining why these guys made so many bad decisions?

Charles Ferguson: I think it's much more about blindness, and perhaps also arrogance. Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld are intelligent, accomplished people. But they seem to have been very narrow-minded, unwilling to listen, and also, in a number of cases, dangerously arrogant.

Alex Gibney: I also think this administration has had an obsession with executive power. I mean that in both the literal sense--in terms of the chief executive, the President--but also in terms of other executives, such as Jerry Bremer, in whom they invested a tremendous amount of power. This is something that goes back into deep history. Ever since Nixon's resignation, I think both Rumsfeld and Cheney have been obsessed with that idea. And that's fed into this larger sense of arrogance, of a kind of willful blindness, because they're determined to retain the prerogatives of the executive, the ability to do what they want to do, no matter what anybody else says.

There are a number of title cards in the film, referencing Bush administration officials who wouldn't speak to you on camera. What do you think is behind that shared reticence, given that Rumsfeld, Bush, etc, seem so confident in their deeds and ideas when they speak to the press?

Ferguson: Well, they're confident when they speak to the press. They're not, in general, nearly as enthusiastic or confident about accepting critical questions from the press when they can't be controlled. And that, unfortunately, has been the experience of not just myself in making this film, but of many journalists who have tried to explore what happened.