Oprah art

From publication The Leftist:

Oprah The Woman, Oprah The Capitalist, Oprah The Humanitarian, Oprah The Profiteer

Artwork by Luna

When beef is non-beef

Jezebel has a post provocatively titled, “Here’s What Happens When You Cross Oprah.” Ominous sounding, no? Well, not-so-much.

The brief post rehashes Iyanla Vanzant’s appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss their falling out over Vanzant jumping ship from Harpo, Inc. for a deal-gone-nowhere with Barbara Walters. Vanzant, a spiritual coach and author who was quite popular in the 1990s, and Oprah have a conversation that, frankly, they could have just as easily had in Oprah’s penthouse. A clip of the interview is on the Jezebel website and it is, to quote Judge Judy, “a lot of who shot John.”

What would be more interesting to examine and track is whether, in her appearances on Oprah’s show and later in her own short-lived show, Vanzant’s message started to diverge from Oprah’s new age spiritualism. As Karlyn Crowley observes in her chapter, “New Age Soul: The Gendered Translation of New Age Spirituality on The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Oprah “translat[es] a New Age vision authenticated by African American struggle.”

Vanzant’s blend of Africanism and new age spirituality would seem to be the perfect mix for a Harpo production. Was this more than a bad business decision on Vanzant’s part? Or perhaps her particular brand of spiritual coaching was too far off the beaten path trod by Dr. Phil, Oprah’s Best Friend Gayle, and other Oprah proteges? Check out Karlyn’s chapter in Stories of Oprah and decide for yourself.

Oprah to…do something to Nottage’s Play Ruined

Hollywood news website, Deadline, is reporting that Oprah Winfrey will take Lynn Nottage’s play Ruined to the big screen. Commissioned by Chicagos’s Goodman Theatre and playing to acclaim in select international venues, such as London’s Almeida, Ruined enters the lives of three women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Facing war and the shortages it brings, but most of all the violence, the play’s dramatic highs and low are ripe for the cinema.

My companion and I actually left the theatre casting the film, but I can’t recall if we cast Oprah as central character, bar owner, Mama Nadi. Nonetheless, reactions across the web to Oprah taking another stab at acting are mixed…stop. I’m lying. Reactions are not “mixed”: people are pretty much uniformly asking for an Oprah-break. As I note in the introduction to Stories of Oprah, success and critical acclaim seem to evade The Queen of All Media’s grasp when it come to being a thespian.

And, as Trystan Cotten notes in his chapter, “Lost in Translation,” the process of de-politicization that happens when Harpo, Inc. gets ahold of a great novel can have not-so-great results.

Let’s hope the name of the play doesn’t become a too convenient diss because Nottage won the Pulitzer for this play for good reason: it’s dynamic, smart, moving, and intricately examines the complexity of women’s bodies as collateral in war. Quick: read the play and read Trystan’s chapter!

Pwned: Oprah’s New Cable Channel

After watching Felicia Day’s brilliant web-based sitcom about World of Warcraft devotees, The Guild, I have a pretty bad case of geek-speak. Thus, Oprah’s Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) becomes the Pwned Network…to no one else but me and entirely in my head. If you pwn someone it basically means you’ve dominated them or eaten their lunch. And isn’t that what Oprah’s vast array of media tentacles does to us: own’s our attention?

Her show  is winding down and hitting all of its usual high marks for, presumably, the last time—Final Favorite Things! Final Audience Giveaway of a Trip in the Worst Economy in Recent Memory! Oprah is in the news more frequently and you didn’t think that was possible, did you?

But get ready because there will be no breathing room between the end of The Oprah Winfrey Show and her network’s debut on January 1, 2011. As this happy-clappy video works to convince us: Oprah’s success is our success. Oprah’s secrets are our secrets.

Despite Winfrey’s use of the collective “we,” she still somehow manages to sound like she means the royal we. This majestic pluralism is telling because it unsuccessfully attempts to hide the fact that this era of continued media consolidation and threats to net neutrality, to act as if “we,” the people-citizens, not we the audience-consumer, have the resources to own a cable channel is a disingenuous claim.

Eat, Pray, Oprah

With the release and critique over the film version of Eat, Pray, Love, it seemed timely to revisit an article that appeared in Bitch magazine. Joshunda Sanders and Diana Barnes-Brown, in their article “Eat, Pray, Spend,” referenced Stories of Oprah authors Karlyn Crowley and Jennifer Rexroat in scoping out the parameters of self-help works they deem “priv-lit”: “literature or media whose expressed goal is one of spiritual, existential, or philosophical enlightenment contingent upon women’s hard work, commitment, and patience, but whose actual barriers to entry are primarily financial.”

Oprah O/S

Ted Striphas poses an interesting idea about Oprah’s brand not being something that is applied to products, but that Oprah’s brand is “producted.” The difference? In my mind, I’ve worked it out that products, e.g. a cookbook, don’t merely have the Oprah label applied to them and, thus, retain some of their original identity, but that those products become a part of the Oprah stable. They take on Oprah-esque meaning by association. Who really cares what the products original form or intent was as long as it has the Oprah essence applied to it?

Ted continues with the idea of Oprah as a platform from which to launch. The notion of Oprah O/S worth contemplating, but from a layperson’s viewpoint (merely gadget addict), I’m loath to go too far with that.

Oprah theme week on In Media Res

Check out the Media Commons Project’s In Media Res, a multimodal, online scholarship website. Featured this week are new takes on the Oprah Culture Industries. Both adored and reviled, Oprah’s cultural reach and impact infuse our daily lives. The week’s lineup:

Monday, February 8, 2010 – Kimberley Springer (Williams College) presents: “Stories of O: Oprah’s Culture Industries”

Tuesday, February 9, 2010 – Janice Peck (University of Colorado at Boulder) presents: “Too Big to Fail?”

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 – John Howard (King’s College London) presents: “For the Sake of the Children”

Thursday, February 11, 2010 – Vanessa Jackson (Independent Scholar) presents: “I’ve been Rich and I’ve Been Poor: The Economics of Oprah”

Friday, February 12, 2010 – Kimberley Springer (Williams College) presents: “Oprah’s Got Beef?: Alleged Matriarchies & Masculinist Rhymes”

Out now!

Stories of Oprah is now available from your local or online bookseller, only in hardback for now, but we have high hopes for paperback and e-versions soon. You can get a sneak peak of several chapters from Google Books.

Book update & Chicken Chaos!

Stories of O has been touted far and wide, at conferences and talks. From Portland, Oregon to Atlanta, Georgia to Nottingham, England audiences have been tantalized with the prospect of, not chicken (see below), but the publication of this cutting edge anthology. The book is in the copyediting phase and still slated for February 2010.

And not a moment too soon! The Oprah news has been fast and furious lately.

Oprah pushes the 160 character message system Twitter into mainstream consciousness by entering the tweet-0-sphere. For some wise-and-otherwise media hipsters Oprah’s presence, as well as other “uncool” latecomers, signals Twitter’s jump the shark moment. It was Oprah’s second tweet, after the one about it truly being her at the keyboard and not an assistant, that lead to the second big O news story…

Sporting a daring red Alice band and no makeup, Oprah let her hair flow free and denied wearing a weave. She engaged the age-old black obsession/white fascination with black women’s hair. How do black women take care of their hair? What does it feel like? To go natural, press it, “relax” it, or insert weave? While Stories of O doesn’t have a chapter on Orpah’s hair choices, we can recommend one of the best books on the historical and social politics of black women’s hair, Professor Noliwe Rooks’ Hair raising: beauty, culture, and African American women (Rutgers University Press, 1996).

And demonstrating the convergence of Oprah, television, the internet, and American’s unsatiable appetite for all things at the price of $free.99, NPR blogs on The Great Free-Chicken Fiasco of 2009. Apparently, Oprah sponsored a downloadable coupon for free factory-plumped grilled chicken from KFC to get Americans to choose a healthy fastfood option—oxymoron, much? The result? Maos and chayhem (that’s “chaos and mayhem” x 20!) at KFC locations around the country, including civil disobedience and staged protests when KFC locations balked at honoring the coupons.

World financial crisis? Global warming? H1N1 flu pandemic? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Anway, according to one hard-hitting Baltimore journo, “This is not a good things to do for people who are especially hungry—tell them, ‘No, you can’t have chicken.'” Indeed, we concur: it is never a good thing to tell hungry people they can’t have chicken.

I am now starving. No one better tell me I can’t have chicken…

Oprah shorthand induces laziness

The Oprah Culture Industry doesn’t extend just to those Oprah Winfrey ordains as ministers in her “church,” as Stories of O Contributor Karlyn Crowley calls it. Oh, no, many media outlets attempt to hitch their wagon to the Harpo star.

http://www.wordle.net/

Take for example a new blog with an occasional Oprah newsfeed. It’s to be seen how useful it will be, but the newly debuted Hollywood industry blog, The Wrap, has launched an Oprah Watch strand as part of its regular reporting. The initial story—about Oprah’s involvement with bringing the phenomenal novel Push by Sapphire to the big screen—falls into a trap that occurs with many blogs, which is using “Oprah” as shorthand and not elaborating on why the story is Oprah-relevant.

Blogs, as an evolving medium, have a tendency to merely replicate news from wires, such as Reuters, or from other blogs. Not only is the result a lack of real news, but also a dilution in journalistic standards of reporting. Where, in essence, is the story?

Oprah shorthand in blogging  means more work for readers seeking in-depth information—not necessarily a bad thing if we want to encourage research and interpretation skills.

Stories of O: the Oprahfication of American Culture is due out February 2010.