Monthly Archives: April 2021

Nick Hudson disentangles

Posted on by
Reply

BizNews held their Inaugural Investment Conference on 18 March this year. The conference was addressed by Nick Hudson, Chairman of PANDA.

The introduction is delivered by Alec Hogg, founder and publisher of BizNews and self-described “disruptive media entrepreneur”.

My trainees, and indeed readers of my book, The Face & Tripod will spot that Hogg has Something to Say in addition to merely telling us about Nick Hudson. He also shoots it from the hip. So far so good, except he is popping his microphone. This is partly his fault inasmuch as he is speaking too directly into the mic, but also he needs to be advised that these days there are microphones that are virtually pop-proof.

Hudson is heard speaking at 1:57, about five seconds before he is faded in on the video. It’s an unusual and appealing production detail which I applaud, but it also prompts me to make a less complimentary comment concerning the staging of this talk. I have already criticised the lectern microphone (or at least its use); I now must say something about the stage lighting.

Hudson is a pacer. He likes to pace to and fro while he speaks, and I have no quarrel with that. I have found over the years that there are people who are simply better at thinking on their feet if those feet happen to be moving. The trouble here is that this makes him go in and out of the stage lighting. Actors and professional speakers learn to love their light and stay within it, and Hudson could do the same, but why should he? He is expert in his own speciality and is entitled to think that those staging this conference are expert in theirs.

The solution is not completely straightforward. There are illuminated screens on that stage whose distinctiveness could be faded if the whole stage was covered with a bright wash of light, and that would be regrettable, but lighting people are good at getting around this sort of issue. I suspect that what went wrong was that they didn’t know that Hudson would be a pacer. A technical rehearsal would have told them.

I’m being very picky here but, as I have said often enough on this blog, the better they are the pickier I get. That creative bit of editing that caused Hudson to be seen in this video after he was first heard signifies a conscientious production team, so I bet they were tearing their hair out over the lighting – but by then it was too late. It didn’t make me tear my hair, it was just something I noticed.

The reason for my equanimity is that the speech itself is so refreshing. Those like me who are bloody-minded enough to be dissatisfied with the ghastly uniform mush that is spewed out by the media, and take the trouble to seek out the actual data for ourselves, will have few surprises in Hudson’s general gist: the surprise is in his being allowed to say it and our being able to hear it through the censoring stranglehold that grips all news these days. This video has of course been taken off YouTube because, his being an actuary and therefore highly skilled at disentangling such matters, he has brought all our suspicions into ultra-high focus and crushed most of the lies we have been told.

When will people get it through their heads that by silencing, or attempting to silence, a contrary opinion they weaken their own credibility? The truth will eventually come out; they must know the truth will come out; the most worrying thing is that they might be attempting to achieve something else first (it’s a familiar pattern). If that something else depends on the temporary preservation of a pack of lies it doesn’t say anything encouraging about the nature of that something else.

Trey Gowdy spellbinds

Posted on by
Reply

There is a small group of people whose speeches I go out of my way to watch, whether or not I plan to cover them in this blog. In fact they all tend to have been here often enough for me to feel guilty about the self-indulgence of taking time watching them at all. Trey Gowdy is one such. When he was a US Congressman I saw many stunning speeches, and critiqued three of them – here, here and here. Then he retired from Congress and I occasionally saw him interviewed, but what speeches he may have made seemed not to appear on line.

Then I saw this one, new and not a political speech. Not expecting to cover it here, I went and watched. I have now watched it several times and will watch it more. He is seen delivering a talk at the Second Baptist Church, Houston at the end of June 2020.

The church is led by Dr Ed Young who delivers the introduction. He describes Gowdy as a ‘gifted communicator’ and even if I’d never heard of Gowdy I’d be interested because when it comes to speaking Dr Young is himself no slouch. Shooting from the hip, which immediately labels him a proper speaker, he speaks with respect, warmth and humour. Also there are technical details like his measured rhythm, his timing, and the way he speaks through a smattering of applause.

At 4:45 Gowdy goes to the lectern and places upon it a few sheets of paper whose function seems to be only to keep the lectern warm, because I don’t think he looks at them till he folds them forty minutes later at the end.

He spends about seven minutes, opening with a humorous story. It’s a great joke, which I first heard with two of the personalities being Edward Heath and Harold Wilson – yep nearly fifty years ago. It is strong enough to withstand the passing of the years, but not perhaps to cross The Atlantic in this form. In the telling you need to include personalities and circumstances to which your audience can so easily relate that it has to be essentially parochial, an augmented in-joke. His audience loves it.

Seamlessly, at 11:50 he swings into his main theme with the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” This unmistakeable sentence from the Declaration of Independence, and Independence Day being only a few days away his theme is independence, personal independence. He addresses it from the standpoint of three factors, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Without doubt any trainee of mine will instantly recognise the value of that structure, how it makes speaking without notes for forty minutes really simple and how he can take the audience with him all the way.

But great communication is more than a neat structure. Gowdy injects a magical alchemy of personal reminiscence, literary allusion, masterful imagery, and thorough horse-sense wisdom, delivered with a superb instinct for measured pace. The occasional giant pause enables important points to sink in but is never so long as to lose his audience. He deploys humour with a formula of little-and-often and it is always delivered dead-pan and thrown away.

Elbert Hubbard is credited as having observed that –

The Highest Applause is Silence

Throughout this speech you could hear an ant licking its lips. The audience is spellbound, as am I. This forty minutes is a life lesson for anyone.

At 43:25 Dr Young reclaims the stage to summarise and conclude.

Clarence Thomas: danger of fawning

Posted on by
Reply

Situated as I am on the European side of the Pond, my information concerning the goings-on in the USA is rather hit-and-miss. I have long since ceased to trust anything at all about anywhere in the world that appears in the mainstream media, so I have sought out my own trusted sources which tend to focus on their own speciality subjects. Anything outside those subjects is therefore rather hazy. I had been only faintly aware of the existence of Clarence Thomas till one particular story brought him sharply into my focus.

I think it was in early 2015 when I saw a story about the building of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (it opened in September 2016). What caught my eye was – at that time at least, I don’t know about now – in the long list of great African Americans who would be celebrated therein was no mention of Clarence Thomas. This astonishing omission of a hugely distinguished black Supreme Court Justice made no sense till you reflected further.

He is a conservative, and extreme leftism is the Sola Fide of this time.

Now that I had him in focus I watched aghast as Created Equal, a biographical documentary about him in his own words was ‘cancelled’ by Amazon earlier this year. [Amazon does not yet have a monopoly on the internet.] Amazon continues to stock his book My Grandfather’s Son.

It is high time I explored one of his speeches, and of course I find it at Hillsdale College where he addressed a Commencement ceremony in May 2016.

Larry P. Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, introduces him. We have very recently seen him introducing others and, as before, I commend every word of the introduction wholeheartedly. You may rest assured that I plan to have a whole speech by him very soon. Justice Thomas begins speaking at 6:20.

I approached this speech, acutely aware of a danger. It is the same danger I faced in my years on the radio when interviewing people I admired. Fawning idolatry is tedious to the reader or listener. I was determined to try to avoid it. I should like to register my thanks to Thomas for providing something for me to criticise. He reads his speech.

You may think that an impudent or impertinent observation. Impudent I may allow, but impertinent it is not. It is a wonderful speech, as I expected, but would have been even better had he shot it from the hip.

It is very easy to understand why he wrote and then read it. In his line of business he has regularly to deliver considered judgements whose every syllable will be pored over by scholars through indefinite posterity. Obviously they have to be written and read. That has to be his modus operandi.

My modus operandi (spot the anadiplosis) on this blog is not so much to pick over each interesting detail as was my won’t in the early days, but to let the readers spot them for themselves. I deal in broader brushstrokes, sometimes highlighting a golden moment. Here is a platinum moment. It comes at 29:36.

Liberty is an antecedent of government, not a benefit from government

It’s a wonderful speech, and I actually do not for once care that he reads it. I’m fawning: I’ll stop.

P.S. (Added a few hours later) Lest it not be clear what I meant when I stated that Amazon has yet no monopoly on the internet, the hyperlink attached to that statement will take you to that documentary elsewhere. And I suggest that if you do so you will not regret it.

Billy Kosco gets off the bus

Posted on by
Reply

The congregation that gathered in St Henry’s Church, Buckeye, Arizona on Sunday 7 February most probably didn’t guess that they were shortly to be witness to a homily that would become a viral internet phenomenon.

Father Billy Kosco delivered something that has been viewed on numerous online platforms nearly one million times, and generated many thousands of comments – nearly all of them positive, in fact I gave up searching for a negative.

I tell my trainees that passion is worth bucketfuls of technique, in fact I have secret ways of proving it to them.

Other than that I have nothing to add.