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Beethoven permeates American culture. His image appears on countless busts and coffee mugs; his music is heard in movie scores, TV soundtracks, commercials, and pop songs; he is Schroeder’s god in Peanuts and Chuck Berry’s freaked-out parent in “Roll over Beethoven.” In this book, Michael Broyles seeks to understand the composer as he exists in the American imagination and explores how Beethoven became a cultural icon. Broyles examines Beethoven’s appearance in a variety of contexts: American commercialism, the Afrocentrist and black power movements, and the modernist critique of Romanticism. He considers portrayals of Beethoven in American film and theater and the uses of his music in film scores, as well as references to Beethoven and his music in disco, country, rock, and rap. In the end, he shows that to examine Beethoven on American soil is to examine America itself.

About Michael Broyles

Michael Broyles is Professor of Music at Florida State University and former Distinguished Professor of Music and Professor of American History at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent book, Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices (IUP, 2007), written with Denise Von Glahn, won the Irving Lowens Prize in 2007.

Editorial Reviews

“This book fills a great gap in our understanding both of Beethoven and of American culture. The panorama of this narrative encompasses antebellum rice plantations in South Carolina and the film studios of Hollywood, music critic John Dwight and rock star Chuck Berry, Theosophy and Black Power, Beethoven’s sketches, and YouTube videos.” — Christopher Reynolds, University of California, Davis

“[Broyles] serves as an intellectual, hyper-informed but genial tour guide to a potentially sprawling subject. Though the book is dense in research, it is never pompous; it could serve as a model for how serious musicological study can be generously shared with interested parties who don’t happen to be in the same profession.” — Santa Fe New Mexican

Don’t Scowl, Beethoven, You’re Loved

The New York Times Book Review – December 18, 2011 (Excerpt)

If we are to believe the Beethoven mythology, which is based mostly on his letters and reports from his inner circle, Beethoven had an unshakeable sense of his own importance. Unlike Mozart and Haydn he refused to defer to nobility, asserting that a composer is of greater value, in the cosmic scheme of things, than a prince. And though he had patrons among the aristocracy, he revered Napoleon, their nemesis, and dedicated his Third Symphony, the “Eroica” (“Heroic”) to him, only to remove the dedication when Napoleon crowned himself emperor.

Beethoven was probably much as history painted him: the deaf painter in sound, ingenious, embattled and defiant, but also a disheveled, scowling force of nature whose unpleasantness and irritability people suffered for the sake of his brilliance. In his music he tweaked conventions and was undaunted when works like the “Eroica” were criticized for their wildness, harmonic adventurousness and, for the time, outrageous length. Such criticisms aside, an enormous constituency regarded him reverently, and unlike Mahler, who believed that his time would come long after his death, Beethoven knew that he had seized his day.

But even Beethoven probably would have been surprised at the place his name and image have found at the heart of American culture, including popular culture. Yes, it’s true that millions of Americans get through their days, weeks and months without hearing a note of Beethoven or giving him a thought. But as Michael Broyles points out in his fascinating but uneven “Beethoven in America,” just about everyone knows Beethoven’s name, if not necessarily his music, and for millions — particularly those with little interest in the symphonic world — he is synonymous with the classics. [Read the full article...]

“Beethoven in America” by Michael Broyles

The Washington Post Book Review – December 23, 2011 (Excerpt)

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be the ghost of a dead classical musician, looking on while the rock and rollers get all the credit for bringing music to bear on pop culture. You might start cursing your luck that you didn’t have a guitar and amp available in your century of yore. Or, if you’re in a somewhat more hopeful mood, you might turn your attention to Beethoven, as Florida State professor Michael Broyles has in “Beethoven in America,” which makes the case that not only was Beethoven the all-around musical stud of musical studs, he might be the greatest of all musical ingratiators, turning up in our American corner of the universe, again and again, and more than most of us realize.

Even though most music fans are not classical music fans, the term “classical composer” tends to suggest the same things to a whole litany of people who don’t know the difference between a bass guitar and a bagatelle. We’re apt to conjure up someone possessed of a fiery and intractable temperament, a severe and draconian guy who’s probably poor and who works feverishly into the night, inspiration coursing through him as he scribbles out his runic notations before banging away at his keyboard. In other words, you probably arrive at an image of Beethoven as he has come down to us through the years in myriad tales, accounts, films, cartoons, lampoons, drawings and history books. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

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Fantagraphics’ new imprint Marschall Books presents Drawing Power, a lively collection of mass market print advertising from the 1890s to the recent past, starring both cartoonists and cartoon characters. While critics debate whether comics is high art or low art, the fact is that the comic strip was born as a commercial medium and was nurtured by competition, commerce, and advertising. Drawing Power will be the first book-length examination (and celebration) of the nexus of art and cartoons. It will focus on the commercial roots of newspaper strips; the cross-promotions of artists, their characters, and retail products; and of the superb artwork that cartoonists invested in their lucrative freelance work in advertising. Drawing Power is cultural history, chronicling a time in popular culture when cartoonists were celebrities and their strips and characters competed with the movies for the attention of a mass audience.

The book will examine cartoonists as public personalities, and their advertising efforts from the first heartbeat of the comic strip as an art form. Here are surprising and familiar examples of products, accounts, memorable ad campaigns, and examples of widely known catch-phrases. Examples of individual cartoon ads through the years include:

• Yellow Kid advertising
• Buster Brown Shoe campaigns
• Dr Seuss’ “Flit” cartoons and his longtime career hyping motor oil
• WWII ads
• Pepsi and Pete by Rube Goldberg
• The best-looking comic strip ads ever: Milton Caniff and Noel Sickles (under pen names!) depicting characters’ personal crises relieved by a coffee substitute
• Little Orphan Annie’s famous Ovaltine campaign, and Mickey Mouse as pitch-man
• Peanuts shilling Falcons and B.C. shilling Dr. Pepper
• Dagwood selling atomic energy
• and virtually every super-hero trafficking in the mortal realm to shill every product imaginable

About Rick Marschall And Warren Bernard

Rick Marschall, called by Bostonia Magazine “perhaps America’s foremost authority on popular culture,” has written or edited more than 60 books. He co-founded Nemo: The Classic Comics Library and Hogan’s Alley magazines and is President of Rosebud Archives. He has taught comics history at the School of Visual Arts and Rutgers University. His biography of Johann Sebastian Bach will be published by Thomas Nelson in 2010.

Warren Bernard has contributed to more than a dozen books on cartoons and comics, drawing upon his extensive collection. He has lectured on cartoons at the Library of Congress, where he assists in the cataloging of their holdings.

Reader Review

Comic strips, as printed in American papers, have been linked to advertising since their very inception, and have been a constant staple of ad campaigns. Now a good-looking, large-format book shows much of the history of advertising cartoons: _Drawing Power: A Compendium of Cartoon Advertising 1870s – 1940s_ (Fantagraphics Books), edited and with explanations by Rick Marschall and Warren Bernard. There is a wealth of information and graphic excellence here, as well as a social history of American enthusiasms and emphases during the period covered. An initial essay by Marschall, “Cartoons and the Selling of America,” is followed by sections devoted to particular artists or commercial products, or themes like the use of celebrities in the funnies to sell certain brands. The graphics are good, even if within the large pages some of the illustrations have been shrunk to get them all in. And even when the cartoons are beautifully rendered, some of the pitches and the products are amazingly stupid, subversively calling into question the principles of commercialization and the judgement of the American masses.

The Yellow Kid, right from the beginning in the 1890s, was a pitchman. A jug-eared urchin in a yellow garment like a nightgown, the Yellow Kid was a sensation, inspiring a musical, buttons, and a magazine. Especially he sponsored products; he had his own chewing gum, which makes sense for a kid, but he also had Yellow Kid cigarettes and cigars, and countless other products. The same artist created Buster Brown. Sometimes a product was an integral part of a cartoon. Jiggs, the oppressed husband in “Bringing Up Father,” used to take a break from Maggie’s domestic tyranny at Dinty Moore’s Tavern, and here is an ad for Jiggs Brand Corned Beef and Cabbage, showing Jiggs holding up a can, with the caption, “You can enjoy on your dining table the same corned beef and cabbage that Dinty cooks for Jiggs, with the same tempting flavor.” This would do for consumers who felt they wanted to eat cartoon foods like their cartoon heroes might do, but often there were advertising strips that featured real human celebrities. These strips looked just like the others in the paper, panels of sequential cartoons, except they had a pitch at the end. In the initial dialogue in a series of panels, a couple are in the stands, and the wife says, “How does Babe Ruth do it? He must be several years older than you are, yet he seems so active and young. I wish you’d find out his secret.” By the end of the panels, Babe has magnanimously revealed his secret: Feenamint laxative gum. Even more bizarre are the sports stars who within their cartoon panels advocated increased tobacco use. There are bizarre ads here drawn by Winsor McCay, who will always be remembered for his beautiful “Little Nemo in Slumberland” cartoons. These, however, show the fist of “American Intelligence” breaking the chains of narrow-mindedness, and they proclaim in all solemnity, “An ancient prejudice has been removed.” The prejudice is the one against tobacco, and it has been removed by the special toasting process of Lucky Strikes. You can learn from these comics that chewing gum is good for your teeth, or that Tom Mix proclaimed Ralston to be the Straight Shooter’s Cereal. You can find full-page ads with the familiar flapper-era cartoons of John Held, Jr., to advise consumers to trust within their cars Timken ball bearings. The work of Dr. Seuss is here, especially illustrating the insecticide-related catch phrase his ad campaign made famous, “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” Among the strangest panel stories are those of Mr. Coffee Nerves. He is the super-villain (complete with cape) in a series of stories where he encourages the characters to consume more coffee, and thereby argue with their spouses or snap at their bosses or throw over their checkerboards to end a previously friendly game. But in each story, some kindly person gets the victim of “Coffee Nerves” to a doctor or other wise person, who advocates the caffeine-free hot cereal beverage, Postum. “Curses! Foiled again by Postum!” is the exit line for Mr. Coffee Nerves.

Many of the cartoons in this colorful collection are handsome, and in hindsight, many are so silly that they call into question any “American Intelligence,” despite what Lucky Strikes told us. That cartoons made such pitches, and with seeming success for their time, is a little embarrassing; either people were dumb enough to fall for the ridiculous pitches here, or high paid advertising companies thought they were. It is, however, all part of the enormous fun of this volume. And this is just the beginning; anyone who looks at these cartoons, which go up to the 1940s, will be looking forward to the second volume that will take us up to the present. Cartoons are still directing us to spend our money. - R. Hardy, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Book review: ‘Drawing Power: A Compendium of Cartoon Advertising’

The Washington Post Book Review – November 22, 2011 (Excerpt)

Rick Marschall and Warren Bernard’s “Drawing Power” is a provocative visual examination of the wonderful world of cartoon advertising. Popular comic strip characters such as Mickey Mouse, Little Nemo and Krazy Kat sold everything from cookies to tobacco. Lavishly and lovingly drawn by talented cartoonists, these ads had a tremendous effect on the financial viability of many products.

Marschall, a former political cartoonist, observes that comic strips and cartoons made the truth “accessible” and that when “lies are told, cartoon ads make the lies seem irrelevant.” Moreover, Marschall notes, “at all times, they have made [selling] fun.” [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Google AdWords Scam?

This morning I received an e-mail from Google AdWords:

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

We had encountered a number of issues when reviewing your ads this morning and we stopped running them. We will review them again and make the necessary changes that will allow to run your ads without any problems.

Click here to review your ads and let us know if we made a mistake.

We’ll often stop running your ads until we are able to make the necessary updates. As soon as we made and saved the changes, your ads are automatically resubmitted to us for review.

Please note: If you do not verify the status of your Adwords account and notify us if your ads do not appear online we can not help you and your ads will stay offline for the next few days.

Note: The above link has been removed for security reasons.

The problem is, we don’t run any advertisement with Google (for good reasons, I might add), and the e-mail is addressed to “undisclosed recipients.”

The link in the e-mail (http://www.google-pd.com/adwords/?ServiceLogin?service=adwords) leads to a website suspected to be a phishing website. Naturally, my browser put up a warning message, and I didn’t go any further.

Channel 11 News Report - As Found Through The Washington Post Advertisement

As we all know too well, traditional newspapers are suffering from the Internet boom. Subscriber numbers are declining steadily, and the online versions (Damn if you do, damn if you don’t) don’t produce sufficient revenue to support the writing staff.

As a result, many newspapers, besides downsizing, tend to sign contracts with the devil… uhm… online advertising companies who promise high-quality online ads. However, even if you use regular Google Adsense (like this very website) you can’t prevent the display of the most despicable, misleading ad campaigns. Even if you can block ads insulting your sense of taste or style, why would you cut the hand that feeds you?

The Washington Post seems to be one of those newspapers who lower their level of integrity and pride in order to produce more revenue through clicks on their online advertisement.

The result comes in form of, in my very personal opinion, dubious ads such as:

• Channel 11 News Report – How a Small $90 Investment Turned Into $3900..
• 1 Mom’s Tip To Make $279/Day
• EXPOSED: New York Mom Makes $4,000/Month And You Won’t Believe How She Does It!
• $65/Hr Job – 25 Openings
• RMGX HOT Penny Stock – Making money vs. saving the planet? Do both! Invest today!
• Spinal Stenosis Pain? See where laser Spine Surgery Began-No Hospitalization!

You get the picture.

Don’t get me wrong, I love reading The Washington Post, especially Rob Pegoraro with his no-nonsense information on technology. I would hate to see The Washington Post vanish into nothingness. The same is true for other publications such as The Boston Globe (and their ever-annoying Netflix-popups on Boston.Com), The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and others.

So, here’s my suggestion:

Support The Washington Post Financially Without Spending A Dime

You can support The Washington Post without spending a dime, and you can do a good deed by clicking on those ads that you personally find despicable and misleading. Every click creates some very small revenue for The Washington Post, but if we all do it frequently, it will support The Washington Post, and it will cost the advertisers.

Just a fair warning, though: Do not submit your credit card or any other information to these websites. Just click and close.

If you have doubts about the advertiser’s intention, please check out my section Making Money From Home, which describes their workings.

Pay special attention to my post The Scam: Work At Home Mom Makes $6,397/Month Part-Time, especially the numerous comments it received by those who were scammed or those who were saved by reading the post before signing up. These scams target and hit the most vulnerable people in our society, specifically those without a job. The workings of the advertisers are officially legal due to their disclaimer, basically stating that the website’s content was faked for marketing purposes.

Happy Clicking! You are doing a good deed!

Note: This post reflects my very personal opinion based on research on the topic of online advertisement. My views should not be taken as a proven fact, and they are not necessarily shared by others.

1) When engaging with Facebook fans, focus on the art of ‘un-copywriting.’ Post like a friend, not like a company.

2) Keep posts SHORT! One sentence works the majority of the time. Employ the ‘less is more’ principal. Overall, the fewer words you use, the more interactions you see.

3) Quantify your approaches wherever possible. It’s great to have x amount of fans or x amount of interactions, but what does that mean? Create benchmarks. Quantify the results to show what those fans and interactions are doing for the brand.

4) In looking at fan and follower growth, lots of companies leveraged every touch point possible. Buffalo Wild Wings has 3.4 million fans on their Facebook page and they employed their concept of “POEM” to drive fan growth – paid, owned and earned media (Forrester.com - http://blogs.forrester.com/interactive_marketing/2009/12/defining-earned-owned-and-paid-media.html).

5) A lot of brands listen and monitor, but it’s important not to just HEAR what consumers are saying, but to USE the information you’re hearing. Maybe it’s product feedback. Maybe it’s a suggestion for an upcoming promo, event or store opening. Maybe it’s a trend in customer service complaints. Maybe it’s a common theme or shared passion among fans to help in targeting ads or developing programs. Regardless of what they’re saying, the truth is they ARE talking and they’re your customers. Are you/we truly listening? And what are you/we doing with the information?

And since you want to protect the valuable property you have created on Facebook, be sure to learn how to back it up by reading my latest blog post: http://www.susangilbert.com/time-to-backup-your-facebook-profile-and-pages/.

Tip offered by Susan Gilbert, AME’s Search Engine Marketing Expert and Web 2.0 company owner, http://www.susangilbert.com/, which provides Social Networking websites and services.

Reprinted from “The Book Marketing Expert newsletter,” a free ezine offering book promotion and publicity tips and techniques. http://www.amarketingexpert.com

It is amazing how many websites you find these days promising you heaven on earth. Let me say it again: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t!

Fast Net Learning is offered by the same company who operates the Web Profit Club, another scammer service. To put it in a nut-shell, Fast Net Learning “teaches” you how to start a web site and run Google Ads on them. There is nothing sophisticated about this; this is common knowledge in the Internet world, and you don’t need to pay to run Google Ads.

If you sign up with Fast Net Learning you will spend money for a useless service. For more information see also my posts on making money from home. The whole Internet scam business started with a fictitious Kelly Richards and articles written about her such as “Work At Home Mom Makes $6,397/Month Part-Time” (If you still need more convincing, have a look at the comments below the article). A great number of people, not only within the United States, but all around the world, have already been scammed and lost their money!

My Advice:

1. Visit a good bookstore (Barnes & Noble has a good selection) and look for “Google Adsense for Dummies” (no insult meant; I love the Dummies series!). Also, look for books on running your own website or blog (FrogenYozurt.com is a blog). This is a one-time investment!
2. In order to run your own website sign up for an Internet Service Provider (ISP) such as GoDaddy.com, BlueHost.Com, or others (FrogenYozurt.Com is hosted by BlueHost).
3. Read my article Does The Google Adsense Get-Rich-System Work?

A Few Comments:

• I checked out the FastNetLearning.com website, and under FAQ I found: “…most people make at least an average of $369 dollars per day…” – Well, call me picky, but if this was a professional service such typos wouldn’t happen. This is probably a one-man operation, and the guy is busy creating websites (which also proves that you can make money through the Internet).
• On the Privacy page, which contains the same wording as the Web Profit Club website, I found: “We can be reached via e-mail at privacy@fastnetlearning.com or you can reach us by telephone at …” – No phone number was listed; the sentence ends without a period.
• The Terms & Conditions page (again, the same content as under the Web Profit Club) is set up in an amateurish way, and they might not hold up in court. I assume, the guy just copied a standard text he found somewhere and modified items like company name and address.
• On the same page it shows “emailing our cancellation department cancel@webprofitcoach.com” which indicates they are running yet another website called WebProfitCoach.com.
• When you switch to the page to “Join Now,” you don’t sign up for the Fast Net Learning program, but rather for the Web Profit Coach.
• Under Terms & Conditions the company’s name is listed as “Media Hub LLC” while under the “Join Now” page it is “Cool Serve Corp.” On all other pages on the website the company name is FastNetLearing.com, LLC (Note the “Learing” instead of “Learning”).
• When it comes to support they give you a phone number and an e-mail address, support@fastnetlearning.com. Be aware that creating such an e-mail address is an easy task for an expert, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a whole support department at work.
• I dialed the phone number as listed on their website, and I got the message, “The number you have dialed is not in service…” – I tried several times, making sure I didn’t dial the wrong number.

Advertisement

Vampire Ascending

by Lorelei Bell Sabrina Strong is a Touch Clairvoyant who knows a secret. She knows her mother was turned into a vampire when Sabrina was ten. Now that she is grown up, a powerful magnate in the Chicago business world hires her to reveal the identity of who relentlessly murders vampires in his ultra-modern stronghold of a hotel. [Read More...] – Including an excerpt of the first chapter.

Vampire Ascending is now available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

According to the above quote, I would like to meet the person responsible for advertisement at the Emerson College in Boston to tell him or her that he or she just wasted a great amount of time and money by creating and mailing an advertisement with absolutely no marketing value. A slap on the back of the head (that seems to be working at NCIS) might be in order, too.

The 6″ x 9″ sized postcard I hold in my hand is nicely designed, and it is filled with a number of (incredibly useless) slogans.

“Discover what makes Ploughshares different” - Okay, but what is it…?

“Finding Tomorrow’s Classic Today” – Classic what? Classic Cars…?

“There’s wonderful stuff [in other journals], but you don’t come up with many surprises. That’s the result of the same people admiring the same things.” – Okay, it’s a journal of some kind…

“Ploughshares’s freshness comes from different people admiring different things.” – Let’s celebrate diversity! Still, what are we talking about…?

Well, my advise to the marketing/advertisement manager at Emerson College in Boston:

First, go to a local Barnes & Noble bookstore and look for a nice book on effective marketing. One of the ground rules is as simple as “A picture tells more than a thousand words.” If you are promoting a printed journal (I can only assume that’s what it is) you should show an image of one of the latest issues.

Secondly, your message is missing! Apparently, you know very well what Ploughshares is, but what about those who never heard of it. I know, I didn’t (maybe it’s just that I am ignorant).

If it takes several minutes of educated guessing to find out what Ploughshares possibly represents, you have lost a potential subscriber, and the free Ploughshares tote bag won’t convince them, either. Yes, I could log on to the Internet and get more information, but, honestly, why should I? You already wasted enough of my time.

Please excuse my sarcasm, but I really do feel bad when valuable resources, i.e. time and money, of a non-profit organization are wasted in such an unprofessional manner.

As always, if you feel inclined to respond, please do so, whether you agree with me or not.